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Ashes2Art: Modeling the Past in 3D
2/13/2008
National Endowment for the Humanities. The Ashes2Art project has garnered intense interest through papers and presentations nationally and internationally; Gill said that interest from colleagues has been "incredible."Coastal Carolina University ran a trial in 2005 to determine the feasibility of a project of this nature, focusing on Renaissance Florence. Following the trial run, CCU's Flaten and co-director Paul Olsen visited Delphi in summer 2006 and were considering it for stage 2. Flaten and ASU's Gill later met at an NEH Institute, according to Flaten, and decided to collaborate and did settle on Delphi for the full project rollout.
Delphi posed a different problem from the ones posed by the Florence project, Gill said. Instead of requiring students to look at still photographs of an existing building and make a three-dimensional model from that, "they [would have] to go to excavation reports and learn how to read site plans ... and then build models that are architecturally accurate." Another challenge was that many of the site plans and excavation notes were in French, requiring students to translate them as part of their research.
While complex 3D computer modeling of ancient sites and buildings has become increasingly common--witness the movie Gladiator--having students do the work, and on the sort of limited budget that Gill faced--is virtually unheard of. Larger, better-known collaborative 3D modeling projects include one between the University of Virginia and UCLA called "Rome Reborn" that creates a fly-through reconstruction of the Roman forum and coliseum.
The difference, Gill said, is that those types of projects used professional modelers and generally relied on copious funding. "What we were doing was to try getting some of the same types of results," she said, "using students and incredibly limited funding."
Historical Accuracy
In general, 3D modeling is replacing the sorts of line drawings that used to be common in presenting conceptual drawings of ancient ruins. One issue with 3D modeling, Gill said, is a concern that the models be accurate. Because modeling can quickly create something that appears to be real, accuracy is sometimes lost in the process.
"One of our concerns is a lot of these buildings go up online, and they're not accurate at all"--something, Gill said, that can happen in computer-generated movie scenes, for example. "What we're trying to do is to ensure that [the models] are accurate" with a heavy focus on research, digital photos, and site visits.
Gill said she wants her class to create 3D renderings that "exactly correspond to the site plan," including where stones lie, basing the creation on intense research, including the many ideas archaeologists have about what the buildings at Delphi looked like.
In an ideal project, Gill said, "we'd eventually have clickable switches to allow somebody to say, 'This person believes that it would have looked like this ... and this person thinks it would look like this.' They could toggle between these different versions, all very well supported [by researchers]."
The NEH grant has allowed Gill to add elements to the course such as actually taking students to Greece to work on-site at Delphi, and to visit other Greek ruins. The project is also being coordinated closely with the Greek government, which is often concerned that computer models are accurate in representing the country's many ancient ruins.
Linda L. Briggs is a freelance writer based in San Diego, Calif.
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