Learning on ScreenVirtual Rome
My early experiences with modeling software were very positive. The process of making these digital models is similar to drawing in a three-dimensional space on screen, using a good set of fairly intuitive tools, with more complex functions waiting to be discovered as one’s skills develop. I found it relatively straightforward to pick up and, indeed, almost addictively good fun. Before long I was producing useful digital content that I could use to generate still or moving images to illustrate talks, lectures, and publications.
When I moved on to Reading, and began running its MA in the City of Rome, I wanted to carry on using digital reconstruction and developed the rather ambitious goal of creating a digital model of the entire ancient city. I had plenty to learn along the way, expanding my expertise to take in assembling, texturing, lighting, and rendering complex scenes, but the model – or at least, the first version of it – is now complete.
My model aims to show the entire city as I think it looked around AD315, the epoch when the widest variety of great monuments coexisted before the city and its empire declined and collapsed. The buildings can of course all be taken out and viewed in isolation – which is why they all look (deceptively) ‘brand new’ – but I like it best when the model is viewed and explored as a whole city. Rome’s topography, its famous hills (actually rather more than seven) and the Tiber river, provided the space for centuries and centuries of continuous building and rebuilding; hills were extended and terraced, and valleys drained and filled, as the city grew. By locating individual monuments in this complex landscape of natural and man-made features, it is possible to see not only how they worked as individual structures but, importantly, how they relate to and interact with each other, and how the meaning of the grand monuments is affected by their location and visibility among the less glamorous residential and commercial districts of the working city.
The fact that one can place a virtual ‘camera’ anywhere within the model means that the viewpoint can easily be changed to achieve these ends. Sometimes the best way to illustrate a point is hovering above the city in a ‘gods’-eye view’ that no ancient Roman could ever have seen; for other purposes, a view at or near street level shows us how the city’s buildings appeared to its ancient inhabitants. The ability to adjust both viewpoint and lighting parameters means that it is possible to use the model for research enquiries as well as for teaching tool. For example, I am currently investigating the visual experience of taking different routes through the ancient city, and the lighting and shadowing conditions in certain buildings at different times of the day and year.
