If you have any questions, feel free to ask.
The question I always get from tech people - yes, all open source software.
90% Blender, 9% Gimp, 1% Darktable or so.
From a Mexican, I'd like to congratulate you for all this effort and thank you for the amazing experience you put together for us to enjoy.
All of this history was taught to me through primary school, and yet, this project made me put together some things I haven't realized before. Visualization goes a long way.
The New Fire ceremony looks amazing, everything else is also beautiful. Thanks again for such a fine piece of work!
First and foremost, this is incredible! Fantastic work! I've always wanted to do something like this (on a MUCH smaller scale) with the Alamo mission, in Texas, as a way to visualize the battle, in real time.
To that purpose, my end goal was always to pull whatever environments I modeled into Unreal engine (so nanite and lumen make short work of my detailed models). Which makes me wonder if you had any plans to do the same?
Walking around in ancient cities should not be reserved for assassination missions in action games (regardless of how fun that is). I'd love to just have a 'day in the life' simulation that I could move through, interact with, and study! Feels like a way to make history feel tangible. It would be awesome to immerse myself in a New Mexican pueblo builder society, or with an indigenous Native American tribe on the praries, or in the Japanese imperial Palace circa the Edo era, or in pre-medieval Europe, or, or, or...
Sorry for the predominant 'what else you got' vibe; I really am impressed by the scope and detail of your work! It just tends to send the mind racing with possibility, which I hope you'll take as the compliment I intend it as!
Great idea. Historic recreation.
Then get various historians, and/or people with regional historic stories, that may have been passed on from generation to generation, and add them too.
Possibly a sidebar to check various layers as in Geo mapping, but instead of features, you get eras and or different points of view.
What made you interested in doing this region? How did you find source material? Also, are you planning on doing more?
I imagine that some nations would even give out grants for an open source and fully immersive, 3d version of some historical region. Like parts of classical or hellenic Greece for example, or Carthage, Cairo, Syracuse, Judea, etc...
If you'd ever like to see it in VR, we run an open source desktop/VR social platform at https://overte.org/
It shouldn't be too hard to set up a server and take a walk among the past. By the looks of it it's probably way too big for the entire thing to be loaded at once, so things likely need trimming down quite a bit.
We're a decentralized system, so you can run your own server if you like.
My first thought when the page was loading was "Wow", then while scrolling even more so. It's impressive.
How long have you been working on this?
Edit: Oh, I see, `This project is the result of over 1.5 years of research and iteration.
It would not have been possible without the input of the following people:`
Incredible work! Since you've made this in 3D, I wonder if that could potentially enable a more immersive way to get more out of the work you've put in than just static images?
Would it be possible to do a sort of flyover video with the assets you've created? Or potentially even plop the assets into a game engine and let people interactively explore?
I was gonna ask, "did you use geometry nodes?" But then I CTRL+F this comment chain.
I've gotten absolutely incredible mileage out of geo nodes for forests and cities. Once you get used to the peculiarities, geometry incredibly superior to using particles and heatmaps. And I'm just a hobbyist! I use Blender for gamemastering, but haven't ever been paid to do it . . yet.
(If that sounds like fishing it is totally fishing. How does a middle-age MilStdJunkie break into the modelling / simulating market?)
Did you do any street-level renders? I realize that it's completely, totally a different kettle of fish, the detail you got here would murder the entire world's computers if it had 1m scale detail.
Fabulous, fabulous work. Amazing. I did something similar for New Amsterdam ~1660CE, for "Providence", a Lovecraftian horror game set in colonial New England. But New Amsterdam and Seekonk in 1660 is nothing compared to this, Tenochtitlan in the immediate pre-contact period.
People have devoted their entire lives to studying this, but I can give a very short overview:
First, there's early colonial maps, such as the Mapa de Uppsala, which give us a decent understanding of the city.
Then there are the accounts of the arriving Spanish. There's also archaeological evidence all throughout Mexico City, though much has been actively destroyed.
Thanks for putting this together and doing all the research. 1.5 years is a long time but the end result looks amazing. Are there any plans to let educational institutions or historical museums use this? I imagine such a presentation would be invaluable for Mesoamerican studies.
A bit of artistic license, but the trees play a crucial role.
They are Ahuejotes, and they keep together the plots of farmland called Chinampas.
You can see some of this today in Xochimilco.
We don't know if that was what it was like in Tenochtitlan, but it is likely. What adds to this is the fact that the houses are all one story, so the trees look taller and more numerous than they are.
In the same vein, many of today's boulevards and highways line up with old streets in your renders, is that a historical coincidence or is the Mexico City layout a direct result of Tenochtitlan remains despite its destruction?
It's not a coincidence. The conquistadors spent months in Tenochtitlan as guests of Montezuma and wrote extensively about how amazing the urban planning was. They would have preferred to keep the city in tact all things considered.
Since the Aztecs had done all of the hard work of figuring how to build out drainage and stability with the chinampas, the Spaniards built their new buildings on top of the foundations remaining from the Aztec buildings. It then took several centuries to fill in all of the canals and turn them into streets so the layout of Mexico City very much reflects Tenochtitlan.
For example the Zócalo square is right where the Aztec ceremonial center used to be and I believe the Metropolitan Cathedral was originally built on top of the foundations of a minor temple that was built as part of the Templo Mayor complex.
I know in The Netherlands this happened in the city I grew up, Hoogeveen [0].
> In the second half of the 1960s, Hoogeveen was the fastest growing town in the Netherlands. Until that period, the town contained a number of canals, which had been dug in the area's early days when it was a prime source of peat and maritime transportation was a necessity for efficient transportation of cargo. By the 1960s the rise of the automobile and truck-based transportation meant the canals had lost much of their economic function, and the canals were filled in.
Text mentions smoked peppers, but there is no smoke rising from the city. Was that too hard or distracting or both? Might smoke be added in the future as an addenda? Inspiring as is to be sure, but for sake of realism it struck me as off since the rest is so detailed and eye catching.
Is that really the expectation? That fire would only be used within the extremely limited range of temples? It seems more likely that there would be fires for cooking and basic industry all over the city. This would have a big impact on how the city looks. Maybe they are using induction for cooking?
Not at the moment, the problem is that the total project is quite large and would require me to write quite some documentation if you wanted to get started. Once I free up some time I might!
If you have any questions, feel free to ask. The question I always get from tech people - yes, all open source software. 90% Blender, 9% Gimp, 1% Darktable or so.