Ancient Rome reconstruction: Domitian's imperial palace

This is something I’ve been working on for a while, it’s a model of Rome’s imperial palace built by the emperor Domitian.

I am doing this project in my spare time for my own personal pleasure. So far I am trying to lay down basic structural details throughout the building. Most of the exterior has been blocked out at least in rough form, and some interiors were started as well.

I haven’t considered lighting setups yet, so for now I used only one sun lamp plus AO for preview renders. I know they look disgusting, but you get the idea. The human shapes you see are what I used to check the scale of all the building locations. The mesh itself is a low-poly male model released to the community by Jonathan Williamson (mr_bomb) that I’m using temporarily.

Ok, here we go:

http://img216.imageshack.us/img216/3926/forumlevelfacadelj6.th.jpg
Northern facade

http://img216.imageshack.us/img216/6458/circusmaximusfacadejv5.th.jpg
Southern facade

http://img216.imageshack.us/img216/9766/aularegiaan8.th.jpg
Aula Regia, throne room

http://img216.imageshack.us/img216/4733/basilicabn8.th.jpg
Basilica, emperor meted out justice and met with advisors here

http://img216.imageshack.us/img216/9094/peristyle1zf6.th.jpg
Peristyle, interior courtyard with central fountain (one of several)

http://img216.imageshack.us/img216/3721/tricliniumwc1.th.jpg
Triclinium, banquet hall

http://img216.imageshack.us/img216/824/nymphaeumpc2.th.jpg
Nymphaeum, open-roofed fountain room

http://img216.imageshack.us/img216/3135/lowerperistyleqf5.th.jpg
Lower Peristyle, open courtyard leading (on the lower level) to the private living quarters of the emperor

http://img216.imageshack.us/img216/7783/stadiumgd2.th.jpg
Stadium, large open courtyard, probably gardens in center

I know all of this looks rather unexciting and repetitive at this point. Before this project is complete I will of course need to address details like ornamental statuary, plantings for garden areas, water for fountains, etc, as well as proper texturing and lighting. But I would like to get structural details complete first before moving on.

Looks good … can’t wait to see your progress (makes me want to go back and finish a similar project).

Me too, me too… Complete awesomeness so far :yes:

excellent modelling!!:yes: this will be a great project.
Rick

Looks really great – one of those projects I always wished I could complete myself. Keep posting!

/ Mats

what are the stats for this project?

did you use high definition or very low poly to do it?

i’m still working on the Rome Colesseum but it’s more difficult then i tough
but i’l do it with patience and time!
not enough good references dwg with details!

can you show close up for the capitals in the yard
the pic you show is now allowing to see all the details of the corinthinan capital

keep up the good work on classical Roman Architecture

Thanks

Hi everyone! Thanks for your compliments and encouragement! Unfortunately I may not have a lot of time this month to work on this, December is always pretty busy for me.

Rickyblender: Oh, I totally missed your wip thread on the colosseum! I’ll be looking for updates to that, I hope things are coming easier for you. I totally understand about references, I’m basically working from a floor plan, a couple model drawings, and book descriptions.

This project will probably be as high poly as I can afford to make it. I feel there are enough low poly realtime models of Rome around, I don’t want to make another. Right now in the entire scene there is about 600k faces for the rough structure, plus 3.3m faces of massively instanced geometry - the columns and stuff. Each shot requires only a subset of all this to be visible, though.

Here’s a closer look at the columns in the courtyard, I disabled ray shadows on the sun lamp to give a clearer view:

http://img88.imageshack.us/img88/1994/peristyle1detailnoshadyk6.th.jpg

The model I’m using is a low(er) poly normal mapped mesh based on a high poly corinthian column model I made. Unfortunately the low poly mesh is really sloppy, and the normal mapping is even sloppier. You can see how bad it looks up close here (low poly mesh on the right, original on the left):

http://img99.imageshack.us/img99/8999/corinthiandetail1lk1.th.jpg

I am going to revisit this later and do a better job. The high poly object is 75k faces, the other one is 6k but I hope to get that even lower with a better mesh.

Thanks for your interest!

one detail

you seems you have mixed up corinthian with ionic capital and composite here
is it not ?

ok i checked some more
and seems that the composite had ionic mixed up with acanthus leaves
but was it used in the time of the roman empirer?
i tough composite came way later in mideval time !
but may be i’m wrong

i began doing a model of an acanthus capital artistic representation for the corinthian
capital but it’s heavy in poly count i’ll try to find where i got this thing an show it later

i did most of the classical capital like doric ionic corinthian and the other more modern version !

but it’s taking lot’s of poly to do it believe me!
mind you i did the capital the base the architrave freeze and cornice

so it’s a lot of modelling but it’s nice

on your model you don’t seems to have put some texture for the stone like some marble
check out ny collesseum and also my egypt post i did use some neat texture
for the stone!
it gives the stone a more natural look - all white is not quit real looking!

http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?p=1265982#post1265982
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?p=1230709&highlight=egypt#post1230709
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?p=1265982#post1265982

Salutations

Hi RickyBlender,

The corinthian order is the one with the acanthus leaves, the ionic is with the scrolls on both sides. See here:

I’d be interested to see your column models, I found the corinthian to be tricky. If you did the architrave, frieze and cornice too then you did a whole building, like a temple? Or just the facade?

I have not done any texture work yet, you’re right. I know it looks bad now, but I’m determined to get the modeling pretty much done first because altering uv mapped objects is a pain.

EDIT: Looks like you edited your post, yeah composite order has acanthus leaves too. For my project corinthian order is most common.
EDIT2: My link above has info on the composite order.

you right thre is a little ionic spiral near the top for the corinthian capital

one thing is that i did not used any UV mapping on my columns!

i found an old file for the corinthian that i began but it’s only 1/4 of the capital and i already got close to 50,000 verticies so it’s big
see pic

i’l try to get my other capital later

i tried to include all the little molding at the different level of the columns
and not easy to do but the only one missing is the corinthian which is so big
i 'v put it aside for now don’t if i can do it with liw poly ?

Happy blendering

Salutations

Hi everyone!

Unfortunately the December holidays took away all my time for this project, so very little progress has been made since my last post. Last week I mostly worked on some modifications to the roofline:

http://img440.imageshack.us/img440/2831/circusmaximusfacade0112ww5.th.jpg

Parts of the facade facing the camera are now messed up, but this area will be completely changed.

I know there isn’t a whole lot to see here, hopefully I’ll have more to show soon.