Pompeii Regio I, Insula IX, House 13 - reconstruction

I created a reconstruction of this Roman town house for my MSc dissertation using digital survey data with the kind permission of Sophie Hay. The project was undertaken by the British School at Rome (Andrew Wallace-Hadrill) in conjunction with the Department of Archaeology of the University of Reading (Michael Fulford), with the support of the Soprintendenza Speciale per i Beni Archeologici di Napoli e Pompei (Pier Giovanni Guzzo and Stefano De Caro).
The standing survey of insula IX was conducted by Sophie Hay with help from Christina Trier, Nowal Al-Shaikley, Anthony Sibthorpe.
The computerised recording was conducted by Raphael Helman, Justin Snell, Marie Noelle Janssens.
Reconstructions of the Roman wall paintings were illustrated by Nicholas Wood.

The aim of my dissertation was to create a realistic-looking interactive model which the user/viewer could "walk" around inside using VR4MAX. The model was built in Google SketchUp from the AutoCAD 3D drawing containing all of the survey data. It was then imported into 3ds Max where it underwent texturing. When this was complete, the model was imported into VR4MAX where buttons were assigned to the opening and closing of doors. My project was not a complete success as the interactivity provided by VR4MAX was very artificial. For example, one button had to be used to open a specific set of doors, another used to close them, still another to open a different set of doors and so on. In addition to this VR4MAX was unable to render the procedural textures used in the 3ds Max model on the exterior walls of the house.