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Olympia - home of the ancient and modern Olympic games a virtual reality three dimensional experience The Statue of Zeus/Poseidon In order to develop a high resolution digital 'copy' of the statue of Zeus it was decided to use state-of-the-art reverse engineering techniques. This approach would enable a dense three dimensional coordinate data set to be acquired within the minimum time possible. A Modelmaker Laser Scanner mounted on a Faro 3D Coordinate Measurement Arm was used to create high resolution point clouds of the surface of the statue. A purpose built scaffold was fabricated in Athens to give the facility to elevate the scanner in order to access the top of the statue whilst also ensuring a stable fixture. The entire sculpture was digitised over several daytime sessions in multiple parts. There were considerable restrictions on this part of the project (including initially no photography, essential for material maps), no method or re-orienting the scanning system datum, and a very short working period in the Museum. These hurdles created complications in the data stitching process as each scan was effectively an independent data set with no points in common other than overlapping surfaces.  Figure 1: Scanning the Statue of Zeus/Poseidon The Site of Olympia The topography of the site and the locations of key structures were also surveyed by members of the team so that the present surface (which approximates the original ground level of the site) could be used in the visualisations. This was performed using topographic surveying equipment loaned by the National Technical University in Athens. A digital elevation model was prepared from this data, and combined with a detailed terrain model of Kronos Hill obtained from large scale topographic maps. In addition, the surrounding landscape was also modelled from smaller scale topographic series maps. As a result of the merging of these 3 data sets, the landscape of Ancient Olympia used in the visualisations is a very close approximation to the terrain of the period. Architectural and Sculptural Elements Olympia was not used as a 'city' as such, it was first and foremost a place of worship, and a place for the celebration of the games held in honour of the Gods. Many of the structures on site were temples, with a few administrative and special accommodation buildings. In 200BCE, there were buildings at Olympia from most of the main architectural periods, dating back to around 700BCE. The date of 200BCE was chosen as the epoch was indicative of the evolution of the site, but without the more recent Roman additions. Information on the architecture was obtained mostly from the publications of the German archaeological expedition, and from Pausanias, a travel writer of the first Century AD (Levi, 1979) Generation Of The Elements The reconstruction of ancient Olympia has been a long and involved process. At all times effort was made to create models and materials that were not only visually appealing but also historically correct. A multitude of published sources were consulted in order to determine the architecture of the missing buildings, the form and colours of the decoration, the statues, the terrain features and vegetation. All of the architectural elements have been built as close to their 'original' descriptions as possible. The original building models were created in Bentley System's MicroStation CAD package, primarily because of the level of experience with this package and its suitability for precise dimension control. This caused many difficulties when translating data into the 3d modelling package used, the only common workable export format was DXF which not only gave considerable errors in relative position of elements but also created very large polygon counts for even simple objects. Much of the building elements were re-created in 3d Studio Max from scratch. All of the structures are in the locations derived from the archaeology of the site, and are true to scale in all dimensions. The heights of the buildings were derived from the architectural remains, and were extracted from the publications. The materials and textures were composed of colours derived from the archaeological and historical record, as well as using contemporary materials typical of the period. The descriptions of the buildings and statues by Pausanias were also used as the basis for much of the material mapping, and for the style and location of the statuary.  Figure 2: Postcards from Olympia All of the animations were created using 3d Studio Max. Consideration was given to using a variety of other packages however the 'render-farm' facility of 3d Studio Max offered substantial (essential) time savings. The render-farm finally consisted of approximately 60 machines, ranging from very fast Pentium PIII to PII computers. Whilst the render-farm required considerable nurturing the process greatly facilitated the delivery of the exhibition in a very short time period. The rendering consisted of 14 animation sequences timed to fit the narration, created as single left and right channel frames for later composition and post production, in excess of 40,000 frames. |