[ThomasKole]

Hey all, author here!

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.

[moralestapia]

From a Mexican, I'd like to congratulate you for all this effort and thank you for the amazing experience you put together for us to enjoy.

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!

[catapart]

First and foremost, this is incredible! Fantastic work! I've always wanted to do something like this (on a MUCH smaller scale) with the Alamo mission, in Texas, as a way to visualize the battle, in real time.

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!

[pomian]

Great idea. Historic recreation. Then get various historians, and/or people with regional historic stories, that may have been passed on from generation to generation, and add them too. Possibly a sidebar to check various layers as in Geo mapping, but instead of features, you get eras and or different points of view.

[asimpletune]

What made you interested in doing this region? How did you find source material? Also, are you planning on doing more?

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!

[ThomasKole]

I can't really say why I got interested, it just happened. History in general is fascinating, and I find Meoamerican history extra special.

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

[dale_glass]

That looks amazing!

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.

[qwertox]

My first thought when the page was loading was "Wow", then while scrolling even more so. It's impressive.

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:`

[malermeister]

Incredible work! Since you've made this in 3D, I wonder if that could potentially enable a more immersive way to get more out of the work you've put in than just static images?

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?

[ThomasKole]

The area is huge, to a point where you have to worry about floating-point imprecision. The sheer amount of stuff in the scene is pretty crazy.

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

[impendia]

This is amazing, one of the coolest things I have ever seen on HN. Thanks for doing this!

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

[ThomasKole]

People have devoted their entire lives to studying this, but I can give a very short overview:

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.

[zelda-mazzy]

Thanks for putting this together and doing all the research. 1.5 years is a long time but the end result looks amazing. Are there any plans to let educational institutions or historical museums use this? I imagine such a presentation would be invaluable for Mesoamerican studies.

[ThomasKole]

It's all CC-BY-4.0, so, yep.

[yoyopa]

is there evidence of that many street trees, or was that artistic license

[ThomasKole]

A bit of artistic license, but the trees play a crucial role. They are Ahuejotes, and they keep together the plots of farmland called Chinampas. You can see some of this today in Xochimilco.

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.

[ouraf]

Have you considered 3d printing this? It would be a massive project, but would be a museum level display piece.

[causi]

How long until Ubisoft offers to buy it off you for a new Assassin's Creed game?

[dakial1]

Amazing work! Congratulations! I never knew Tenochtitlan was so huge and beautiful

[htamas]

Amazing work! I just came back from Angkor, Cambodia and I wish there was a similar reconstruction for that place also.

[m0llusk]

Text mentions smoked peppers, but there is no smoke rising from the city. Was that too hard or distracting or both? Might smoke be added in the future as an addenda? Inspiring as is to be sure, but for sake of realism it struck me as off since the rest is so detailed and eye catching.

[subroutine]

This image shows smoke rising from the temples:

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

[erwincoumans]

Amazing work. Are any Blender .blend files available? How large are they?

[ThomasKole]

Not at the moment, the problem is that the total project is quite large and would require me to write quite some documentation if you wanted to get started. Once I free up some time I might!

[wishfish]

This is amazing work. Do you have any street level views? Would be interesting to see some of the neighborhoods and plazas from ground level.

[ThomasKole]

No streetview level, the reconstruction is definitely "impressionistic" in that way. There's only illusion of detail, it does not hold up up close.

[backtoyoujim]

Has there been any attempt to recreate the daily wood/charcoal smoke released from that all that ?

[joshuaheard]

Great work! I'd love to see some close ups. Maybe a street view like Google Maps.

[simonebrunozzi]

Congrats for your work! The last night photo is perhaps the most beautiful.