A METHODOLOGY
FOR RECONSTRUCTING HISTORIC SITES
The project
Our project is a huge project that aims to set up a methodology for reconstructing historic sites. We are convinced that modern technology can now serve other fields such as history, archeology and tourism.
We are a team of 10 people, specialized in : reconstitution, production, filming, computer graphics, programming, ....
We have been working on this project for 2 years now and we are starting to see the benefits. We chose to use the Unreal Engine 4 engine because it offers photo realism capabilities that other graphics rendering engines do not offer today. It also gives us an advantage over other projects of the same type that are based on simpler technologies like Unity.
Our methodology applies to any type of site, regardless of its location and the historical period covered. The very first step is the scientific and archaeological study. It is necessary to regroup the existing information, and to supplement with assumptions which are based on the knowledge of the numerous parameters like the way of life, the people uages and similar known sites.
Then we proceed to the reconstruction work in 3D. Unreal Engine (including Unreal Studio), allows us to quickly go to the first visuals and start discussions with specialists.
We create a 3D database (a world in UE4). This world will serve us to decline this data in many applications (and all the interest of this approach is there!)
A) The first application is to help scientific research, support the assumptions of historians and make them discuss inside/around the 3D reconstitution, with the help of virtual reality for example. This help filling the void and agree on the hypotheses for finally propose a complete model closer to truth.
b) Create content that can be used by cultural entities. Create videos, images, reconstructed sites. The photorealistic side of UE4 help a lot for this. Create educational content for schools.
c) Create virtual tours for use in cultural and heritage sites. VR can help immerse in past everyday life and make emotions come to life on sites that are not existing anymore today.
d) Create game apps to help explain the life of the time and put visitors in situations. This also captivates children as well as all visitors who are not necessarily interested in History. Gaming is a very good vector for transmitting information and knowledge.
This methodology is currently being created by our team. We chose a first theme that we know well since it is the reconstruction of our city (Narbonne). The chosen period is ancient Rome: The city was then named Narbo Martius.
We are filling each day a full documentation about the process we set up and follow, improving them at each new houses or place in the city. We also increase our UE4 knowledge by sharing with technical experts.
In all cases we will continue that project. We would like to partner with EPIC, first because we are happy to use their tool today. We also want to achieve more things in a short period of time. The grant money will help increasing the team work and have in november 2019 a greater demo and showroom during the yearly archeology convention.
What have already been done
VIRTUA NARBO
Why Narbo ?
In ancient Rome, in 118 BC, the Roman Empire spread over a vast territory from Italy to Spain. The Roman legions founded the colonia narbo martius, which in a few centuries became an important city. She was nicknamed "the daughter of Rome". It gave its name to the first province created by Rome out of Italy, “La Narbonnaise”, which covered half of the current territory of France.
Narbo Martius became the first capital in Gaul. This city can be considered as the first capital of France, centuries before Lutèce (then Paris).
Thanks to its gigantic port, the second of Roman antiquity after Ostia (the port of Rome), Narbo Martius was for several centuries a hub of the economy in the Mediterranean, exchanging with Rome, Carthage etc.
The city has today totally disappear but is still buried under the current town of Narbonne in the Occitanie region.
REBUILD NARBO MARTIUS THROUGH VIRTUAL
With the help of archeology, we now know better the history of that town. The archaeological excavations confirm the importance of this city and provide enough data to reconstruct it.
Our project benefits from the collaboration of the greatest world specialist in antiquity reconstruction, Jean-Claude Golvin.
For 50 years, this renowned archaeologist, architect and illustrator has been reconstructing the cities of Antiquity. Its know-how is used by archaeologists but also museums around the world, publishers of books and magazines and scientific public, producers of documentary films for television and for some years the producers of video games. So he just worked for the company Ubisoft and made the preparatory illustrations to the Egyptian set of the video game "Assassin's Creed Origins" and works on the next episode of this mythical serie.
Jean-Claude Golvin, because of his expert knowledge in both scientific and media, was the ideal person to put on paper the reconstructions necessary for the virtual reconstruction of Narbo martius. Thanks to these drawings, monuments as imposing as the Capitol of the city, the largest after Rome, the amphitheater or the districts with rich murals (the most beautiful with those of Pompeii and Herculaneum), will be built using the 3D software used by our team of graphic designers.
SHOW NARBO MARTIUS THROUGH UNREAL ENGINE
The Unreal Engine software is the ideal tool to give life to Narbo Martius and allow to move freely in the various applications:
a) Scientific and educational use
b) « Virtua Narbo / Tour » : The guided tour
c) « Virtua Narbo / Game »: The game / serious game
EDUCATIONAL AND SCIENTIFIC USES
An obvious teaching tool
The ancient city of Narbonne is on the program of middle school students in France. Proposing a virtual visit of the first capital in Gaul has an obvious interest!
A tool for archaeologists
VIRTUA NARBO is a great tool for working on a Narbo Martius restitution that can evolve with current and future scientific research. Thanks to the use of VR headsets, the archaeologists will be able to immerse themselves in the ancient city and see the restored vestiges.
During our preparatory work, we already experimented this kind of work: Jean-Claude Golvin and the graphic designers were able to interact during a VR session. The experiment was also carried out with an archaeologist, Raymond Sabrié, who was able to visit the site he has been studying for 50 years, the porticoed house of Clos de la Lombarde.
"VIRTUA NARBO / TOUR": THE GUIDED TOUR
Virtua Narbo will be available in two forms: visit and game. The choice will be possible after having passed the introduction of the applicaion.
For the first time, Virtua Narbo will allow to visit a Roman city without limitation of displacements (all the axes of circulation will be usable) and with many emblematic places accessible.
Two types of visit will be possible: free and accompanied. In both cases, the visit will be at height of man, in immersive mode, with the possibility at any time to display the map of the whole city and also go directly from a place to the other to avoid too long trips.
Free visit
It is essential that the tour allows visitors to learn new things during the visit.
The visit will provide access to information points (points of interest) delivering comments in different media (historical texts and anecdotes, photos, video). This information will notably allow to see images of the excavations archived by Past Simple for 25 years (photos, videos).
Depending on grant amount, the visitors will be able to watch scenes of life and meet anonymous or historical characters. They will be able to interact and question them.
Accompanied visit
At any time, the user can switch to the "guided tour" mode.
Depending on the grant amount, this guide may appear as a virtual character, a young Roman adult woman or an actress in a window video or simply a voice-over.
List of the main detailed and visitable places
A dozen sectors will be accessible to a detailed visit :
> The residential district of the Clos de la Lombarde
> The Capitole and the forum
> The Horreum
> The sector of the Old Bridge and the Via Domitia
> The Amphitheater
> The warehouses and the wharves
> A sector of the ramparts
> One of the necropolises
Map of all the planned sectors
Internationalisation
We are obviously considering adapting this visit in several languages (this will also depends on the grant amount).
Sales
We already approached the local communities to propose our project (town hall, agglomeration, region, private entrepreneurs). They were all interested in this project as well as in the development of new projects.
Virtua Narbo may also be distributed or sold online (Epic store/Steam).
January 2019: Presentation of our project at the Archbishops' Palace in Narbonne in front of 150 people, the leaders of the future museum and the local political representatives.
"VIRTUA NARBO / GAME" : THE GAME / SERIOUS GAME
The scenery created for the virtual tour will also be a great playground.
A first game we will create will be an "escape game" at the city level. The player starts locked in the underground galleries of the horreum. He has limited time to understand the situation and do the right things to get out of this place. Then he finds himself on the bridge where he must meet a priest who will give him an important info. The third scene is on the edge of the arena where he will face a gladiator who has just fought. This one tells him that he has to go to the residential houses (Clos de la lombarde) to meet a famous painter who has come in secret.
Other derivatives
There are no limits in the use of data from this world "Virtua Narbo". There are still many other possible usages and we confirm this at each of our meetings with our potential customers/partners.
Who is working on the project
PASSE SIMPLE (project)
Created in 2003, Past Simple is a company specialized in the mediation of archeology. The company produces documentary films for television, for museums and exhibitions. For the past three years, Past Simple has been publishing books and comics in the same spirit.
Past Simple works regularly with scientific laboratories related to archeology and heritage, and institutions such as the Ministry of Culture, the College of France, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs etc ...
Since its creation in 2003, Simple Past regularly uses the techniques of 3D CG images to restore the monuments and include these picutres/video in its documentaries. CG artists use softwares like 3D Max, Lightwave, Maya or Blender.
Passé simple understand that using real-time 3D engine can speed up any production.
Official website : www.passesimple.net
THE TEAM / The key men
Our technical team is supervised by Marc Azéma in close collaboration with Jean-Claude Golvin. The two "key men" of this project have comparable profiles because they work both in the professions of the image and in archeology. They have known each other for nearly 15 years and have collaborated on numerous films and museographic productions. They have become references in this sector by publishing also many articles and books on the subject of the restitution in archeology. They are bridges between science and the general public. Virtua Narbo is a great achievement in their collaboration
Marc Azéma
Marc Azéma is both a designer-director, specialized in documentary film and multimedia, but also an archaeologist. This explains his specialization in the mediation of this cultural domain.
As a scientist, he is a associated searcher at the Center Cartailhac for Research and Study on Prehistoric Art (CREAP) (www.creap.fr) within the Mixed Research Unit (UMR) 5608 TRACES de Toulouse. Since 2001, he is a member of the scientific team responsible for studying the Chauvet cave in Ardèche.
Since 1995, he has become a specialist in parietal art and has published several works including "Prehistory of cinema" in 2011 where he exposes new interpretations demonstrating the existence of graphic narration and cinematography since prehistoric times! The result of his research that renews the origins of cinema has been the subject of many articles and TV topics around the world and allowed the realization of a documentary film of 52 minutes for the european TV Channel “Arte" "When Homo Sapiens was making his cinema" in which he exposes his theories in an attractive and visual way (2D and 3D animations). This film has been broadcast around the world and has received numerous awards in archeology festivals. An exhibition on this topic has been created "Prehistory of cinema" and circulates since 2017 in South Korea.
> Teaser of his latest film about Jack Kirby, "Kirby at war", the co-creator of super heroes Marvel comics with Stan Lee :
> Teaser of "When Homo Sapiens was making his cinema" :
> Extract on the first prehistoric cartoons highlighted by Marc Azéma :
> Teaser of his book "Prehistory of cinema" :
> One of his articles :
Jean-Claude Golvin
Jean-Claude GOLVIN is THE specialist in the restitution of monuments and cities of Antiquity. This know-how, also on the other periods of the humanity (Prehistory, Middle Ages ...), make it the major and world reference in this field and thus the key-man to draw the restitutions in this project.
His skills are such that Jean-Claude Golvin is regularly solicited by film producers and museums, publishers and more and more by the video game industry: Ubisoft commissioned him illustrations of restitutions of Egyptian monuments used as a backdrop to "Assassin's Creed Origins". He is currently working on the next "Assassin's Creed" game.
In 2018, during the Archeological Convention in Narbonne, he explained his approach to the professionals, along with Maxime Durand, historian of Ubisoft for the series "Assassin's Creed".
Jean-Claude Golvin is the author of more than 1000 drawings of restitution of ancient and medieval cities and monuments, deposited, for the most part, at the Arles Museum, the most active in France for this period of history after the Louvre/Paris.
His career as an architect and Research Director at the CNRS (National Scientific Research Council) was largely devoted to this theme. It allowed him to deal with many examples and to deepen a theoretical reflection on the subject. He is the author of numerous scientific publications and works for the public.
He was Director of the Franco-Egyptian Center of Karnak in Egypt for over 10 years and collaborated on the first 3D render on this site.
In 2018 he also realised a dream : published a comic book. The story starts in Rome/Italy and takes place in Narbonne (and will continue in Egypt). This comic strip "Quadratura" was published by Passé Simple. For Passé Simple, this is a great story-board to develop the virtual renditions of Narbo Martius, an obvious step before the realization of Virtua Narbo.
Official site : www.jeanclaudegolvin.com
Various place JV Golvin specially worked on:
EGYPT, SPAIN - PORTUGAL, NORTH AFRICA, EAST MIDDLE, GAUL (FRANCE), GREECE, ITALY, TURKEY, GERMANY , ENGLAND, CROATIA, ALBANIA.
What is the money is going to be used for?
We already spent money and time in this project and will will continue to develop it. With the help of a grant, we will be able to buy more CG artist work, characters, animations and voice acting. We also will be able to have a greater demo in November during the archaeological convention (and have a network installation of 4 VR headset instead of only one). Today we are using a PC and VIVE headset that a VR company lent us. We would like to buy our own computers.
With money, we will work to have 3D characters and make our world alive. That will be better for the virtual visit.
We will present to the public our finalized project at the end of the year 2020. This will coincide with some great event in the aera: An international museum entirely dedicated to this city will open. Its architecture has been designed by one of the greatest architects of today, Sir Norman Forster. All Archaeological items found in the soils of Narbonne will be presented (and the collection is huge).
"Narbo Via" The futur museum of romanity in Narbonne
1 - PHASE 1: PRE-PRODUCTION (completed phase)
> 2017/2018: Realization of the restitution drawings by Jean-Claude Golvin
For two years, Jean-Claude Golvin realized many researches (publications) and hundreds of illustrations on Narbo Martius. At the end of this work, he was able to offer a general view of the ancient city as well as detailed views of the main sectors (Capitol, Amphitheater, Old Bridge, warehouses, residential neighborhoods etc).
> 2017/2018
For two years, Jean-Claude Golvin realized many researches (publications) and hundreds of illustrations on Narbo Martius. At the end of this work, he was able to offer a general view of the ancient city as well as detailed views of the main sectors (Capitol, Amphitheater, Old Bridge, warehouses, residential neighborhoods etc).
Self-investment : 50 000 euros
This work had for goal to conceive the background of a graphic narrative story. The city was at the top of his glory. The story is a fiction written by a historian specialized in the city, Chantal Alibert. This fiction is based on historical events and places that have existed.
The publication of this work took the form of a comic strip, "Quadratura", published in November 2018 by Passé Simple editions.
> First half of 2019 : First 3D building and integration tests in Unreal Engine
Self-investment : 50 000 euros
During the first half of 2019, the illustrations of the archaeologist / architect Jean-Claude Golvin but also all his preparatory work (architectural cuts, decor details, etc.) allowed our 3D artists to test two sectors of the emblematic city. The Capitol and the residential area of Clos de la Lombarde.
These modeling and texturing tests were then integrated into Unreal Engine. We made a first demo (TPS gaming and VR demo) to start the work with specialists and to present our work to our potential partners
2 - PHASE 2 : PRODUCTION (to accomplish)
Total investment: 155 000 euros
Thanks to the help that we solicit, we will be able to produce more content and the evoked variations. This phase will cover a year and a half of production.
> July to November 2019 : realization of a complete and playable demo
The first five months of production will allow:
> To finalize the two first sectors of the worl
> List permanently the other sectors accessible to the detailed visit and the game (and do a first pre production of them)
> Create the general map
> Create the full game design document and prototype of the escape game.
Detail of the investment:
- Purchase of a demo machine: 2000 € Laptop + 500 € VR headset.
- Graphic designers work (small missions): 5 months x 4 graphic designers x 1000 € = 20 000 €
Total: 22 500 €
Map of all the planned sectors
> November 2019 : presentation of the demo at the “Archaeological Convention” ("Rencontres d'Archéologie de la Narbonnaise")
The demo will be presented to the press and public in the context of an event that is authoritative on the domain of archeology: the "Rencontres d'Archéologie de la Narbonnaise" (RAN). For 6 years, this event takes place in the fall in Narbonne and allows to cover the news of archeology in the field of documentary film, literature. The audience is of all ages with school and adult competitions. And since three years a professional day allows to discuss about technology, numeric and virtual aeras topics.
Last year, a focus was made on the design of the Discovery Tour of "Assassin's Creed Origins."
This event will take place this year again in Narbonne in November 2019. It is therefore the ideal place to present to the public, but also to professionals, our demo of Virtua Narbo. The organizers of the RAN agree to include this presentation in their program.
This presentation will take two forms:
> presentation of the demo with wip as part of the professional day which will take place on Friday, November 6, 2019 at the Palais des Archevêques in Narbonne.
Audience: Archeology professionals, heritage and museum curators, documentary film producers and directors, video game designers, graphic arts and 3D schools, general public.
> Show room: Demo presentation to the public with VR Headset, in one of the rooms of the Palais des Archevêques de Narbonne during the whole week of the Rencontres d'Archéologie de la Narbonnaise.
Audience: general public and professionals
Detail of the investment:
- Creation of a complete showroom with 4 machines. Purchase of 3 additional machines: 3 x 2500 € = 7500 €
- Programmer for demo creation visit to several: 2 months x 3000 € = 6000 €
Total: 13 500 €
> December 2019 / December 2020: Production
The release of Virtua Narbo (visit and game) is scheduled for the end of 2020. This release will coincide with the opening of Narbo Via museum and will also benefit from this event.
During this year of production, we will finish to complete our budget (private investors / Collectivities) (Because the whole project will cost more than listed here).
Depending on the amount gathered, we will develop more several aspects: virtual characters (guided tour and game) and will work on the translation of the game (foreign versions).
Detail of the investment:
- Mission graphic designers: 12 x 4 x 1000 = 48 000 €
- Programmer missions: 6 x 3000 = 18 000 €
- Character and animation missions: 4 x 6000 = 24 000 €
- Producing & translations: 12 x 2 x 1000 = 24 000 €
- Audio and voice recording: 1 x 5000: 5000 €
Total: 119 000 €
> Perspectives beyond: a Virtua collection (venue / city)
Once realized, Virtua Narbo will serve as a model / pilot for a collection integrating on the same principle other places and cities of antiquity or other periods: Nîmes, Aleria ...
Some comparisons
What is the money is going to be used for?
What is the money is going to be used for?
> Comparative images between our project and another less beautiful and no real time
Comparative image between CNRS project Archeovision (on the left, offline render) and our project in real time under UE4 (right)
> Comparative images between our project and another less beautiful with real time
Comparative image between Rome Reborn VR project (on the left) and our project in real time under UE4 (right)
Contact
Passé Simple
Passé Simple
6 boulevard Gambetta
11100 Narbonne
FRANCE
Mob : (+ 33) 6 70 86 25 37