VIRTUAL CITIES INHABITED BY AUTONOMOUS CHARACTERS: A PIPELINE FOR THEIR PRODUCTION

Abstract

[EN] Creating 3D reconstruction of the past is a challenging task requiring a vast set of technical skills, with teams usually including historians, 3D artists and IT technicians. In this paper, we describe our combined efforts to work under a low-budget pipeline to make a 3D simulation of the medieval village of Mértola in the south of Portugal. The work we describe in this paper is part of a larger project called "BIHC - Bio- Inspired Human Crowds" whose partial objectives are the development of a set of tools for the animation of 3D reconstructions of cultural heritage sites. We have focused on developing a lightweight model of the village that would allow the incorporation of virtual autonomous inhabitants in a simulation running in real-time and visitable by online audiences in both i) bird’s-eye and ii) first-person points of view. The contribution of this paper is the identification of a set of tools and stages that can be used to obtain the final interactive environment recreating the inhabited ancient village