Salutatio at the House of Pansa

Note: this page is very graphics-intensive, since it visually documents the creation of the virtual House of Pansa. Viewers with slow connections are asked to be patient as illustrative images load.

Salutatio at the House of Pansa was modeled and rendered using Martin Hash's Animation: Master software. The virtual house is actually a complex series of geometrical objects, onto which image maps (like "digital wallpaper") are applied, virtual lights are shone, and which are placed together in a choreography, which is then rendered by the software to create a snapshot or movie of the virtual space.

Above is a screen shot from Animation: Master, the software used to create Salutatio at the House of Pansa. On the right is a sample rendering, showing the paterfamilias in the tablinum. Surrounding it are just some of the myriad controls that are manipulated behind-the-scenes to create the beautiful and apparently simple views of the virtual house.

Behind the facade of beautifully rendered imagery, the virtual House of Pansa is an incredibly complex simulation of the geometry and physics involved in this slice of life, which had to be hand-crafted bit by bit in a very labor-intensive and time-intensive, yet extremely rewarding, process.This screen shot shows just some of the virtual infrastructure that underlies this tablinum scene. Every surface is actually a network of "control points," which are digitally painted and manipulated to mimic their real-world counterparts.

Before any 3D modeling could be done, it was first necessary to learn the complex Animation: Master software. This was done by completing a series of test projects and tutorials supplied with the software and designed to teach the basics of using the program. This training was done in the first few weeks of the grant period.

Throughout the virtual model’s development, test shots of the work in progress were created to record the different stages of construction, and to assess the various methods used in recreating the 3D house.

Preliminary Sketches

Once the preliminary research and design of the house was complete (see Project Overview for more information on this phase of the project), rough computer sketches of the house’s walls and floor plan were created in Photoshop, based on an elevation printed in August Mau's Pompeii: Its Life and Art and John Dobbins' AutoCAD floorplan, incorporating actual photographic data from the archaeological site when possible. This was to give a general idea of how the house would look, and to help identify problems of the virtual recreation before production of the actual 3D model began.

(Above) Rough sketch of the recreated decorative scheme for the virtual House of Pansa's walls. (Below) Rough sketch of the floorplan for the virtual House of Pansa.

Basic House Model

The AutoCAD floor plan created by John Dobbins for the Pompeii Forum Project was loaded in Animation: Master as a “rotoscope” image, and the basic shapes of the atrium and its adjoining rooms (vestibulum, alae, and tablinum) were modeled in 3D. This basic framework of the house included only blank walls, without columns, cornices, or decorations. The impluvium was also modeled at this stage, since it had to be considered when creating the floor textures and geometry. As the project developed, this basic model would be modified many times over to accomodate new additions.

Texture Maps

The next stage was the creation of textures for the flat surfaces of the house. These included wall decorations, doors, floor textures, and mosaics, and were based on the rough sketches already compiled in the research and design phase of the project.

The walls were decorated based on a basic design recorded by August Mau in his book, Pompeii: Its Life and Art, and on archival photographs that recorded the colors used in the stucco decorations. After the basic color layouts were designed, “bump maps” were created, to be used by the computer to simulate depressions on the walls. Bump maps were used because they are most efficient for describing subtle nooks and crannies in already complex computer models.

Doors were recreated in Photoshop based on designs from the House of Sallust, and were integrated into the existing image maps for the side walls of the atrium.

Floor textures were created based on photographic data compiled on the Pompeii Forum Project website. These photographs were loaded in Photoshop, where they were retouched and digitally enhanced for use as tile-able image and bump maps for the virtual model of the House of Pansa.

Mosaic surfaces for the vestibulum and tablinum were also based on photographic evidence. The vestibulum mosaic, decorated with a dog and the warning, “CAVE CANEM,” was based on a photograph of an actual vestibulum mosaic in the House of the Tragic Poet, a contemporary wealthy Pompeian residence. This image was retouched and resized to fit the dimensions of the vestibulum of the House of Pansa. The tablinum mosaic was based on the remains of the House of Pansa’s actual tablinum, and a bump map was created for it, to give the illusion of a tiled surface.

Once these image maps were created, they were all carefully applied to the 3D model wall-by-wall, and aligned to fit precisely with each other and with the house.

Sequence of three screen shots, showing the process of creating and applying image maps to the virtual House of Pansa. At each stage, the image mapping became more complete and more refined.

Ornament

The next step was to create 3D decorations to adorn the virtual house, and to add realism and depth to the recreation.

First, decorations were created for the side walls, which originally had small cornices integrated with the stucco work. These could have served as shelves or simply as decorations to add flair to the walls. These were modeled in 3D, then integrated with the rest of the walls, and carefully aligned with the existing virtual stucco work. Each wall had at least two sections of cornice, and some had as many as four.

Once these were completed, columns were modeled and placed at the front entrance of the atrium, the tablinum, and at each ala. The capitals for the columns were constructed based on drawings and photographs recorded in The First Style in Pompeii: Painting and Architecture by Anne Laidlaw. Tests were made using bump and displacement maps for the capitals' ornament, but these proved unsuccessful, so the decorations were modeled by hand in 3D instead, with beautiful and realistic results.

Lastly, large cornices were created to sit atop the columns. These were modeled in 3D, fitted, and integrated into the reconstructed house, which was growing increasingly complex as the project progressed.

This sequence of images documents the creation and application of the 3D ornamentation for the virtual House of Pansa. Note how the geometry of the house was modified to properly accomodate ornamentation and the application of additional image maps. The bottommost screen shot reveals how the creation of the virtual House of Pansa, like the contruction of a real home, was an ongoing process, and how existing structures had to be temporarily moved or modified while others were constructed.

Furniture

The next step was to create furniture to adorn the recreated House of Pansa. This included tables, a cistern, impluvium, lamps, and a chair. All furniture was created based on actual Pompeian furniture, documented in Pompeii: Its Life and Art by August Mau, and Le Arte Decorative in Pompei by Vittorio Spinazzola. This furniture was modeled in 3D, and then integrated into the House of Pansa model. At this point, the roof was also added and fitted to the compluvium.

This screen shot shows the cistern, table, roof, and compluvium in place. The cistern was later moved to a more proper place, alongside the impluvium. The apparent structural distortion is due to the use of an unnaturally wide camera angle, used to get a wide view of the room.

Character Modeling

The next major phase of the project involved the creation of 3D animated characters to occupy the virtual reality House of Pansa. All characters would be variations of a basic Roman prototype, which then would be modified to represent characters from different walks of life.

The first step in their creation was to model a basic human face, based on actual Roman portraits. This was modeled in great detail, and then colored and textured using image maps from Photoshop. Eyebrows, eyelashes, lips, and hair were added, as well as skin tone and hair color.

These screen shots show the completely modeled face before and after the application of fine details such as eyes, eyebrows, and lip color (above). The bottom picture shows the complex geometry underlying the face and the controls used in the face's creation and manipulation.

Next, a body was created for the head. This body was then “boned” using the Animation: Master biped skeleton, which would be used later in the project to pose and animate the completed characters. In the process of boning, the body is organized into various components, each of which responds to the movement of bones placed within it, much like the armature of a robotic puppet, or even like the bones and flesh a living vertebrate.

The top two images show the front and back of the preliminary body created for the characters in the virtual House of Pansa. The characters were later modifed and enhanced by integrating a basic human body model supplied with the Animation: Master software; this was more efficient than creating physical nuances, most of which would remain hidden by clothing, from scratch.The bottom image shows a later screen shot of the bone structure within the Roman character; each color is a section of the model attached to one of the diamond-shaped bones positioned within it. These bones control the movements of the "flesh" attached to them.

This basic human model was then fitted with clothes. First, a tunic and toga were modeled. Next, they were fitted to the character, and animated using the “Cloth Wizard” feature of Animation: Master, which simulates the motion and reactions of cloth interacting with a moving human body. Unfortunately, after a series of attempts to make this feature work correctly, it was decided that it was too burdensome on the limited processing capabilities of a home computer, and that it would be more practical to clothe the characters using simple 3D models, hand animated with the body, instead of simulated by the computer.

These screen shots show the creaton of clothes for the virtual House of Pansa's occupants. A basic tunic and toga, whose color and decoration remained flexible, were created and fitted on the character model. The bottommost shot documents an abortive attempt at using Animation: Master's built-in "Cloth Wizard" feature; even at low resolution, the simulated cloth system took prohibitively long to calculate, and failed to fit the character's body properly.

Once this basic prototype figure was created and clothed, it was posed to see whether its virtual skeleton and clothes worked properly. Several poses and animations were tested and created, and character creation moved to the next stage, which involved creating the different types of Romans to populate the house.

These three images demonstrate some of the difficulties encountered while posing and animating the character. Computer animation is a grueling and meticulous task, and even the simplest movements can require great amounts of planning, manipulting, and refining before they begin to approach visual plausibility. Particularly challenging was posing the toga without intercepting the geometry from the tunic or body underneath it; this problem required refining the bone structure (which also affected garments) several times in order to obtain the desired result. The bottom test pose is based on an ancient Roman statue of a gesturing orator.

Four types of Romans were created: the paterfamilias, his slaves, working class clients, and aristocratic clients. The paterfamilias was clothed in a tunic decorated with red stripes, a toga, and red shoes. His hair was changed to grayish to reflect his age. The slaves were clothed in tunics decorated with red stripes (to match those of their master), and brown shoes, with dark brown hair. Working class clients were dressed in an off-white tunic without stripes (only the richest Romans wore the bleached white toga) and plain brown shoes. Aristocratic clients were dressed in a plain white toga and tunic, with brown shoes.

This screen shot shows a grouping of the four types of characters created for use in this project: (from left to right) working class client, aristocratic client, slave, paterfamilias, and another slave.

Lighting Design

Once the basic modeling of the virtual house was complete, lighting was designed to evoke the mood of the early morning hours in ancient Pompeii.

First, blank hemispheres were modeled to represent the world outside, visible at the front entrance, compluvium, and tablinum. Blank sky was used for the front entrance and compluvium, but for the view outside the tablinum, a photograph of the ruins of the actual peristyle at the House of Pansa was used, as a dramatic, anachronistic reminder of the fate of Pompeii and its residents. A series of tests was conducted to see which colors and light settings best complemented the architecture and created the illusion of the proper time of day. Finally, shades of bright blue were used to reflect the intense Mediterranean sun shining in the early morning.

This screen shot shows a preliminary lighting test for the simulated early morning sunshine created to illuminate the salutatio ritual. The purplish hues were later abandoned in favor of plainer but more realistic blues.

Next, lights were created and placed to light the interior of the house. These lights were intended to portray natural light, so they were created with a muted hue of grayish yellow. These were placed by window openings to mimic the glare of early morning sunshine. An intense “volumetric” spotlight was placed atop the compluvium’s opening in the ceiling, to dramatically light a corner of the house.

Lamp lights were placed to portray the emissions of the oil lamps placed around the atrium. Unlike the natural lights, these were made much dimmer, and were of a darker amber hue, to create the illusion of soft candlelight.

These two screen shots both show the same scene in the tablinum with different light settings. The bottom picture was rendered with shadows turned on (which dramatically changes the effect of the scene, but, unfortunately, also dramatically increases the time it takes for the computer to render each scene - which is why most shots of the virtual House of Pansa were rendered without shadows turned on).

Virtual Reality

The next stage of production involved the creation of a QuickTime Virtual Reality environment of the House of Pansa, which would place viewers within the recreated house in the middle of the salutatio ritual. In order to create the QTVR immersive virtual reality environment, a sequence of 15 shots at 24 degree intervals were rendered from within the House of Pansa in Animation: Master from a point beside the impluvium. These shots were then cropped in Photoshop, and loaded into Ulead COOL 360 software, where they were assembled into a single panoramic shot and exported as a QTVR file, which was now viewable on the web as a 3D virtual reality environment. A flat JPEG panorama of the house was also exported for viewers without the QuickTime plugin, with slow connections, or who simply wanted to see a single panoramic shot of the House of Pansa's interior.

This screen shot shows the Ulead Cool 360 software, which was used to assemble pictures of the virtual House of Pansa into a QTVR environment and a JPEG panorama.

Animation

The next stage of production involved animating the 3D characters as they'd appear for the salutatio ritual. First, the poses and movements of the characters was decided upon. Next, these poses were created as "Actions" in the Animation: Master software. These actions were then loaded into the characters, which were placed in the house as part of a larger choreography.

Problems appeared in the software at this stage of production. The animations would not render correctly: the computer would only show lights, without any architecture or people. After many days trying to solve this problem in a number of ways, using technical support, the Hash Animation: Master mailing list, and an SGI workstation at the University's Digital Media Lab, the animations were temporarily postponed so that the rest of the project could be successfully completed, since so much time had been wasted trying to overcome the software glitch.

These two screen shots show some of the frustrating problems that appeared when it was time to render the character animations. Neither shows a properly rendered scene, but both should.

After days of troubleshooting and experimentation, a way to successfully animate the 3D Roman characters was finally found. A scene of the paterfamilias, attended by two slaves, looking up to see an approaching client, was created in Animation: Master, and rendered as a QuickTime movie. The original movie was over 2 megabytes, which was too large for the Web, so the movie was re-rendered using Sorenson compression, bringing the file size down to just over 200 kilobytes.

Web Presentation

The final stage of the project involved designing and creating a web page to present the final product. The website was designed in FrontPage Express, using sleek, fast-loading, and elegant HTML, so that the site would be easily accessible to as many viewers as possible. The design of the site was based on the same "First Style" decorative scheme that adorned the walls of the virtual House of Pansa. After weeks of hard work, Salutatio at the House of Pansa was complete and accessible to millions of viewers on the World Wide Web.

Technical Notes