I was reading Google’s Sketchup Blog recently and came across some interesting news. Google is planning on having a 2010 3d Basecamp.
3D Basecamp 2008 was integral in my training on Google Sketchup. I taught myself the program completely from playing around and watching Youtube videos. Recorded videos from 3D Basecamp 2008 allowed me to see someone using the program live and demonstrated skills and techniques not readily available. Whenever I teach a Sketchup class I tell all my students to immediately go to the 3d Basecamp website and watch the videos. There are over ten and they are all over an hour. The benefit I say is that it will answer plenty of questions you have and bring up things you didn’t even think of.
Sketchup has so many shortcuts and multiple ways to accomplish one task. 3d Basecamp helped streamline my process. This first Basecamp was aimed at more of the beginning side. 3d Basecamp 2010 is aimed more at the Sketchup Power users. There is an application for attending! I actually had to send the registration team an example of something that I modeled.
Sketchup Blog describes “This time, we’d like to welcome SketchUp experts – ninjas, gurus, fanatics, la crème de la crème – to join us. We want to see what will happen when everyone in attendance is a SketchUp master.” They are hoping for an “unconference” in which there is tons of user participation and discussion.
I applied. After closely reading the guidelines of the application I failed. I was supposed to send a link to an Image’s direct URL. I sent them to one image on my Flickr page. Oh well. The conference is in Boulder, CO. I live in Washington, DC. Also it is the first 3 days of September. I am getting married August 21st. A lot of variables that don’t add up.
Either way I am sure Google will be recording these sessions for future use and learning goodness. I hope to see some really great tricks that I can incorporate into my workflow. For those that are interested in the 2008 library of knowledge go here.
Google Sketchup is a big portion of my life. I use it every day at work and has gotten me to the position I am in. I am certainly an advocate of the program and I hope that more people open their eyes to how powerful it is.
If you are up for the challenge and want to go to the conference, applications start here
I read a really fun post over at Gamesradar entitled, “The Top 7 Historical Figures Defamed by Video Games.” Most of the references were obscure or really bizzare. A lot were Asian warlords. Go ahead and check it out. It got me thinking about the time I wasted playing the game Caesar in Elementary School. I have a feeling this was a really key moment for me in starting to like Ancient History.
I was brought onto this game after I had mastered Sim City. I had created the ultimate city and was now ready for a new challenge. Let’s create a city in Ancient Rome. I had a blast. I wasted countless hours developing the ultimate city state. With a little help from some online gaming websites I had figured out the perfect formula.
Soon I branched out to other games like Sid Meier’s Civilization. I am currently working with Rob Cloutier, a 3d designer who worked on the game. Please visit his website www.3dhistory.com to see some of his work. He’s very talented. Civilization took the history angle to a new level. Now I was starting multiple cities and managing entire military campaigns. Beneath the framework of fun, a lot of educational building blocks came into place. You had to elevate from the stone age to the bronze age, by discovering certain aspects of science. You could only progress in your building by collecting more natural resources. Pretty tremendous all around.
Eventually you can find a way to reshape a lot of the historical landscape. I actually conquered the planet Earth with the United States. It was pretty awesome. USA! USA! USA!
Shawn Graham at Electric Archaeology has taken this to a new level. Many of these games allow for modification of your own campaigns. Shawn has added campaigns to Civilization IV and Caesar IV and began using them as teaching tools for his students. He believes that he can edit parameters of the game to help teach his students different aspects of Roman History.
“I want to use Caesar IV as a simulation to explore Roman economics. The idea is, I’ll get my students to play this scenario, and in playing it, it highlight/contrast game mechanics with the current understanding of how the Roman economy works (if you think modern economic thought is dry, you ain’t seen nuthin’ till you’ve read the ancient version… gaming economics ought to be way more fun for my students!)”
As great as it is to use Video Games to teach history, it is also fun to just ride around cause havoc. My friend Doyle just bought Red Dead Redemption. The game is Grand Theft Auto set in the Wild West. I played for about 10 minutes and was immediately hooked. Correlating with all 3d history, video games give us not only a chance to see the past, but to interact with it. Due to the lowering attention span of our youth and the increasing amount of technology in schools, I would not be surprised to see video games being used as a teaching tool 10 years from now. Educational games are already out there, let’s just bridge the gap.
All of this has gotten me wanting to play some games. I am going to dust off my copy of Age of Empires!
CG Digest just put up a great post on the “Best 45 free 3d Models that you can find”. There is a large array of the types of models that are included. Nothing is screaming history but it always nice to find free models when you can get them.
As you might notice from the Flickr sidebar, I work in the hospitality industry. My day to day includes a lot of creating models of ballrooms and event setups. I am happy to add this nice chair to my collection. Some rich bride will love to see this around some banquet tables!
So free models on Memorial Day. Thanks to all our armed service members past and present!
I found an excellent post from the Official Google Sketchup Blog that tracks the excellent work being done by Michael Hathorn, a High School Teacher from Hartford, VT. He has taught his class the basics of Google Sketchup through the recreation of their own town. Hathorn gave them the assignment of telling the history of individual buildings and recreating them for Google Earth. The Video below gets in depth on the project as well as their website.
There are a lot of great quotes that really illustrate exactly why I like to use Sketchup. Hathorn says that he will go around the town with his students and they will point out buildings they are excited to recreate. The seniors in High School think it is “cool to sketch it up.” Each student knows that they are preserving their city’s history while learning a fun, free program. One student’s quote really hit home, “I can go on any computer in the world and see something I created.” That is something you can sell to students. Their classwork is going to put into an international database. Anyone can see it. Truly empowering.
I recommend anyone interested in Sketchup in the classroom check it out. There is some words on using it with Geography classes as well as Design and Production classes.
3d History Blog is going to be partnering up with CyArk again to help do something meaningful. On Tuesday March 16th, 2010 the Royal Kasubi Tombs in Uganda were destroyed by a horrific act of arson. For those who don’t know…from http://www.kasubitombs.org
“Situated on Kasubi hill, within Kampala, Uganda, the Kasubi Tombs site is an active religious place in the Buganda Kingdom. To the Baganda the Kabaka is the unquestioned symbol of spiritual, political, and social state of the Buganda nation. As the burial ground for the previous four Kabakas, therefore, the Kasubi Tombs is a place where the Kabaka and others in Buganda’s complex cultural hierarchy frequently carry out important centuries-old Ganda rituals.”
As one of the most active religious centers of the Kingdom the destruction of these tombs was devastating. Thankfully, a little over a year ago the team from Cyark traveled to Africa to scan and preserve this UNESCO Heritage Site. In conjunction with their team I am going to create a 3d Model to help better the process of them recreating their sacred site.
Updates will most certainly follow
UPDATE: THIS WAS MODELED BY SCOTT OLSEN
CHECK OUT http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/search?q=pmolsen&scoring=d
He used the data created by University of Arkansas
I found this via the Google Earth Blog
“In 2005, researchers from CAST used the Optech ILRIS-3D laser scanner to scan the ancient ruins of Machu Picchu in Peru. To read more about the survey, please visit the section on Machu Picchu Project Details. Three data sets from the Machu Picchu survey are available here as point clouds in the Polyworks PWK format (as IMInspect projects). Data are currently not available in polygonal mesh format. Be sure and visit the Free Data Viewer section to download the latest version of Polyworks IMView that allows you to not only view and interact with the data but also perform different types of measurements.”
I recommend everyone take a look at their site and watch this nice Youtube Video Below. GREAT JOB!
I have spent the past week deciding exactly what I wanted to say about the Association of Ancient Historians 2010 Conference. Ultimately I feel two different ways: impressed and disappointed.
The level of scholarship and minds in that lecture has was impressive. Professors from over 50 different Universities were represented and I meant some extremely interesting people. The topics of each session were broad, but the research papers were typically not. Many of the speakers got down to the detail on many issues I have been interested in for sometime. Garrett Fagan’s paper, “Watching the Fighters” tapped into the carnal reasons why the Romans loved watching Gladiators and how we are not so different today.
During the Warfare in the Ancient World session, William Murray and Philip de Souza both tackled new approaches to Ancient Mediterranean naval warfare. The accepted opinion for centuries has been that ancient ships were used for ship to ship combat. Both men proposed different ideas. Murray claimed that large ships were used for sieging harbors and defending trade route as set pieces. De Souza believes that the ships were mainly troop transports and supplied light infantry for raiding villages through the ship’s oarsmen.
Of course I gravitated towards many of the more palatable topics. Gladiators and Warfare are easy subjects. Although I did enjoy some of the more nuanced papers. “The Patronage of the Intellectuals in the Court of Diocletian” by Byron Nakamura explained how Diocletian, despite not being an educated emperor like Marcus Aurelius; actually employed intellectuals in his court to advise him and increase his favor in the Senate. The Session on Ancient Macedonia explained the differing opinions on comparing the Argead monarchy to either a tribal ruling power to a more traditional Dynastic lineage.
I was most impressed with everyone’s depth of knowledge and fluency in Ancient languages. I received numerous handouts in Ancient Greek and Latin. I only speak English. All the participants happily perused all of the literature and could follow along with the slides. I spent a lot of those portions checking NBA Playoff scores on my Ipod Touch. After a conversation with a Seth Bernard, a graduate student from UPenn, I found out that all true historians must know at least 2 Ancient Languages. As well, its apparently not that hard. Maybe for someone who goes to UPenn. I really came away wowed by the same people I was being taught by in College.
At times though I was truly disappointed. Multiple times I heard a presenter refer to themselves as a “Luddite.” A Luddite is defined as “One who opposes technical or technological change.” Said presenter would continue to put their head down for the next 30 minutes and read directly from their research paper. Meanwhile, the 9′x12′ screen above them remained blank and I was left staring at a dark stage and a semi-interesting lecturer. It might be easy for a scholar of Ancient History to deny the great tools that can add to an already impressive piece of research. I on the other think that it is a major waste. If I knew I was to have the paper monotonely read to me, I would have preferred to have read it myself. The most captivating presentations for me, were the ones that actually utilized Images and slides to help strengthen their paper. Provide visual aids to make the topic feel more alive. Someone had a presentation about deciphering one stone slab from a Sanctuary. Ultimately the topic was boring and sort of pointless. The catch was, I got to see the stone slab and take a stab at deciphering it myself. I did not have to take her word for it. Which is what a lot of these presenters would have liked me to have done. Powerpoint is not hard to learn, and a picture is worth a 1,000 words.
I was also disappointed that the History building I studied in was not nearly as nice as the Carolyn Tanner Irish Humanities Building at the University of Utah. I spent 4 years studying in The Francis Scott Key Building at the University of Maryland. We had one small lecture hall and a few different classrooms that were less impressive than those at my high school. My senior year the second floor got a flatscreen TV that welcomed us to the building. Francis Scott Key was the head building for the whole Arts and Humanities School. Whenever I would visit the Business Building at Maryland I was envious of all the bell’s and whistles. The Carolyn Tanner Irish Humanities Building had two wonderful Auditoriums along with a deli/snack bar, TVs, lounge areas, and beautiful classrooms. I loved my professors in Ancient History at University of Maryland (Dr. Holum and Dr. Eckstein), but our facilities were not the best.
Ultimately this conference was a major success. I met some really interesting people and got to talk a little about my blog. Everyone seemed interested and I think there really is an audience for use of 3d in History. Even if someone is a Luddite, they still think recreating destroyed monuments and recreating cities is still pretty cool. A lot of people suggested I go back to Grad School. I do not know if I could ever have the time, intelligence, or bank account to move forward. I am not ruling it out! I still think I have a future assisting historical scholarship.
I really respect what the Association of Ancient Historians is doing. I was glad to be a part of their conference and I hope to attend again next year.
Recently my final product of Temple II at Tikal was posted at Cyark.org. As I have previously mentioned Cyark “is dedicated to the preservation of cultural heritage sites through the CyArk 3D Heritage Archive, an internet archive which is the repository for heritage site data developed through laser scanning, digital modeling, and other state-of-the-art spatial technologies.” I was lucky enough to get into contact with them last year via twitter after reading an article featuring them in Archaeology magazine. You can read more about it in the About section of this site.
This was my second project for Cyark and I much more proud of this than my last attempt, Monte Alban. The main difference between the two models was that all of my textures I used for this model were from actual pictures of Temple II at Tikal. Justin Barton and the team at Cyark has been extremely patient and let me work at my own pace.
My work flow begins with utilizing the cloud point diagrams found on Cyark’s website. Cyark gave me access to a user account where I was able to take individual measurements of all aspects of the model. The models I am working with only hold a fraction of the million cloud points taken by Cyark’s 3d scanners. 
The process is always very slow at first. After working in Sketchup and being completely used to the work flow, going back and forth between this unfamiliar 3d viewing program was a little difficult. Thanks to the MONTHS it took me to do Monte Alban, I have gotten the hang of it.
Throughout the process of measuring the features of the model, I began creating the model. Google Sketchup has my been my most used program on my computer for the last 3 years. For a free program it does some amazing things. I never had a background in CAD or 3d modeling and learning this on my own was not intimidating at all. Unlike learning 3ds Max, which I am doing right now.
Once I was finished with the base model of Temple II, I began texturing it. I took pictures of Temple II from Cyark’s website and began to slowly crop parts of the temple and resize them to fit their individual parts. This is one of my favorite parts of the modeling procress. This is where the model really begins to come alive.
After the texturing process I was able to convert the it into a .3ds file to send off to Cyark so they could add it in the 3d Viewer. Please go check it out here. I am not really sure what project they are going to have me do next. I think I might jump ahead and start to work on the Temple of Jupiter at Pompeii. Cyark is slowly filling out its ranks with new and exciting things. I hope to have a full feature on them with an few interviews as well.
Check out that picture. That is from the Sistine Chapel Virtual Tour. I found this while reading the The History Blog and might I say this is spectacular. Created by a team from the University of Villanova, they had 2 years and unprecedented access. From tons of pictures and painstaking effort an amazing 3d recreation of the Sistine Chapel is in front us of
Honestly I have never seen the inside of the chapel. I have never been to Europe and really all I have seen is the picture God reaching out, ya know the famous part at the top of the building. I try to prop up 3d History in the realm of recreation. This is what is so amazing about sites like this. This is history that is still available for us to see today. If somehow war was to hit Italy and this building would be destroyed, that would be an ungodly tragedy.
Being Catholic myself, some people try to say that you shouldn’t need huge buildings and fancy churches to worship God. Oddly enough though, stepping foot in buildings like this you really can sense the presence. The high ceilings and the beautiful artwork puts your mind in a different place. I am set to be married this summer at the Basilica in Baltimore. The Basilica has some beautiful domes that were actually designed by Latrobe. Not being a Gothic style cathedral it really is going to add something spectacular to the ceremony.
Buildings like this should be able to be preserved forever. Thanks to projects like this by the team from Villanova this is one more piece of history we can hopefully save.
This is certainly one of the places everyone needs to see, but for now the 3d tour can make due.
GV5YQ3NMWUPP
I stumbled upon this great video by the artist Ancientvine. www.ancientvine.com at a post over at The Ancient World in London. This video was brought to light in reference to a project in England to light up the wall’s complete length, all 84 miles of it! This video is supposed to be a recreation of what Hadrian’s Wall and the fort Pons Aelius would have looked like in 200AD.
The Roman Presence in England is an often forgotten part of the overall Roman history. There are many exciting stories including many revolts. The most interesting would certainly be the one led by the warrior queen Boudicca.
For most lay people out there a nice way to get a fun glimpse of what this period might have been like should check out the movie “King Arthur”. I know that it really isn’t historically accurate but when it comes to historical epics how often does that matter? The movie was directed by Antoine Fuqua (Training Day) and stars Clive Owen and Keira Knightley. I was more excited by the roles played by Ray Winstone and Ray Stephenson. Ray Stephenson is also known to me as Titus Puolo, the badass soldier from the show Rome.
At this point I am now rambling. Great job by Ancientvine and I am certainly going to explore some more of his work
