Scene assembly for large scale urban reconstructions

Reconstructing large areas of historic cities involves assembling a scene from a combination of knowledge of areas that no longer exist and known monuments that have survived and can still be (at least partially) observed and measured. In many cases little detail is known for such areas although it can be anticipated that buildings in some specific generic styles would be typical of the time and place. At UEA considerable effort has been put into creating a Scene Assembler package for the CHARISMATIC project which brings together individually designed objects from detailed modelling packages such as 3DStudioMax and combines these with other more generic building prototypes. These objects are then laid out using a number of extremely powerful and user friendly operations within a landscape and sky dome. This process makes it easy and quick to put together a complete city scene, which is accurate enough, historically, to give a feel for what the area would have been like. The models constructed using the tools are intended to be used as backdrops for reconstructing historic populated events. This paper describes the stages in defining such models and the various tools available to speed up the process.