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.

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!

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!

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...

Thanks for making this btw, great work!

I don't have any concrete plants for more, but who knows!

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.

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:`

My question: what kind of evidence/sources were helpful in figuring out what Tenochtitlan looked like?

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

———

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoogeveen

if that sounds like way too much work, any chance you would open source your work for needs to add to it?

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?

Perhaps I can bake it down to something like what you might see in Google Earth in 3D.

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.

https://tenochtitlan.thomaskole.nl/image_dest/newfire_twopea...

Unfortunately the VR files now longer work without the VRML plugins, which are no longer available or supported (AFAIK).

It could be made to work again with the X_ITE 3D Javascript viewer though, which I tried recently to view some old VRML files.

Reminds me a bit of the 3D Starry Night.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=G7Dt9ziemYA

Kudos to this artist

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinampa?wprov=sfla1

https://youtu.be/86gyW0vUmVs?si=zz61OacembAksi76

Cortes landed at Veracruz the next year, in 1519.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/56/Acuna-So...

The reason that diseases from the old world were so deadly, when they crossed the pond, is that they'd evolved to spread quite well even in humans with an evolved or acquired resistance and were suddenly in a completely unprepared population.

How feasible would it be to build some sort of AR component? In particular, I'd love to be able to see your rendering for my current position, as I wander around Mexico City.

I'm surprised the original city centre square was preserved, but all the original pyramids were knocked down, was it really worth the effort just to get those stones?

The casing stones from the much larger Egyptian pyramids were all scavenged several centuries ago:

https://www.thevintagenews.com/2016/09/06/the-great-pyramid-...

Of course it's easier to pick stones from a convenient pile that's already where you need it, even if it perhaps requires some banging at them to get them loose. Most convenient quarry on the continent, likely the exact reason why you started building in the vicinity in the first place.

But I'm certainly not immune to perception through those petrol-colored sunglasses myself, please don't read this as "look at that fool!"

It wasn't just to get building materials.

You don't want a giant monument to gods that demanded human sacrifice as a prominent part of the skyline when you're trying to convert the local heathens to Christianity.

https://www.amazon.com/Conquistador-Hernan-Cortes-Montezuma-...

It would be amazing if you created an interactive history experience based on this. I'd love to be able to jump around to see where all of the historical tentpole moments happened throughout the city, such as the mass slaughter that happened while Cortez was away, and other historically significant moments.