Procedural Pompeii

Procedural Pompeii is a test case for the CityEngine modeling software and has been created as environment for the European Project Cyberwalk, where a visitor can walk around in the reconstructed ancient Pompeii in any direction on a mechanical treadmill. You can read more about Cyberwalk in the press: BBC and Swiss Television.

The creation of 3D models of ancient sites has often been focused on their major monuments only. This is logical, given the high costs of traditional 3D modeling. Thus, to efficiently reconstruct entire sites like cities, a large number of domestic buildings and workshops need to be generated automatically. Their appearance should follow the aesthetic and statutory architectural rules of the corresponding epoch. From various GIS (Geographical Information Systems) data given as input, such as population density, land usage, street network and building footprints, the CityEngine assigns type and style of the buildings to its footprints and calls the corresponding shape grammar rules to efficiently create detailed large-scale models. The shape grammar rules which are responsible for the creation of the actual building geometries are manually derived from photos and plans of remaining buildings, archaeological excavation data, and (historical) paintings. The model has been completely generated with the CityEngine prototype.

Approximation to Reality:

• The footprints of section 6 are based on archaeological input data. For the rest of the model, only the street blocks are based on real surviving/excavation data i.e. the subdivision into building lots has been generated procedurally. Note that we provide also the areas which are not excavated yet.
• In the archaeological data we used, it is often unclear how one building can be defined: on the one hand a building may consist just of one room, on the other hand, large villa structures may span a whole street block. We solved this issue by assigning each footprint a unique building ID.
• Besides the temple of Jupiter, the building geometries on top of the footprint are not based on excavation data i.e. no surviving structures are included in the model.
• The temple of Jupiter and the forum are the only monuments we provide. These two models have been generated with the CityEngine too.
• In the provided model the terrain is flat. In reality, the site of Pompeii was not not completely flat - unfortunately we did not have access to a DTM.

• Can be used as proxy for navigation and camera setup
• Untextured

• Simplified, but can still be used for walk-troughs
• No interiors

• Reasonable polygon count
• Perfectly suitable for high-quality walk-throughs
• Although almost no furniture is included, the interior structures of the buildings can be explored

• Extremely high polygon count
• Includes projecting stones on the walls and roof tiles
• Suitable for high-quality renderings and as massive model test set for academia

Note: The model has been created with the CityEngine prototype. An updated, more detailed version of the whole model will be available soon after the commercial release of the CityEngine.

Models: We subdivided the whole city into parts. One part is publicly available as example. In addition, the temple of Jupiter and the forum are provided.

File organisation: The file archives (one per LOD per part) contain for each building one file. Hence, to import the city in a modeling or rendering application, the import procedure can be scripted.

Textures: The applied textures can be downloaded here: procedural_pompeii_textures.v3.tar.bz2. In case of Wavefront Obj, extract the textures into the folder with the mtl files.

• Diffuse color in the “Ka” field
• Main color texture in the “map_Kd” field
• Bump map in the bump channel
• Dirtmap texture in the “map_Ks” field

Filename Filesize Last modified procedural_pompeii_forum_lod2_with_tex.tar.bz2 30035929 2008-02-08 11:31 procedural_pompeii_jupiter_temple_lod1.tar.bz2 1622316 2008-02-05 23:59 procedural_pompeii_jupiter_temple_lod2.tar.bz2 43932132 2008-02-05 23:59 procedural_pompeii_temple_forum_mass_model.obj 32497 2008-02-06 19:08

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