Here have a historical demo from Axeon Software showing the Bastille fortress in Paris, before its destruction after the 1789 French Revolution: Bastille 1789
For this project we targeted all the devices (phones, tablets and computers).
We use the PBR workflow, baked lightmaps and the dynamic shadows. As we had some instance objects, we couldn’t share any baked lightmap for them, so we cast the dynamic shadow and we stopped rendering it when the scene is ready. Ghetto lightmap 101
This is awesome!
The soft contrast and the map on the bottom remind me of those intricate illustrations in encyclopedias, and high quality paper models.
I can almost see the castle cut up in half, showing its inner structure. All those little chambers, corridors and dungeons…
Like @aFalcon said, so much potential!
I believe so!
I wish a taskforce of the community can be organized and build on top of this wonderful scene.
Maybe @Crotmoul can provide a bit more info on the background of this demo?
Is it commercial or experimental?
It’s experimental but with a commercial objective , we want to be positioned for the patrimony market. We have 360 images, for example Notre-Dame in TimeLoop Paris, but we want to go further.
Again thanks all for the good feedback, it is nice for us.
To answer to your questions, have some more details about this little app:
• Specs:
The modeling has a total polycount of 590 000 vertices (no fear!), and we used 105 different textures (albedo, normal maps, ORM and some decals for the dirt pass). Adding to these we also have 37 lightmaps to enlight the whole thing.
Speaking of lightmaps, they were also used as a second layer of dirt by painting stains and cracks on them.
The texture pack may seem heavy but we used low resolution images, from 64x64 to 512x512 px. We still keep some more HD textures for the large areas, to have some sharp details.
Our main performance goal was to make it running smooth on the oldish Ipad 2.
• Graphics:
As said earlier, we made good use of the dynamic shadows to bring some light and dark effect to our instance elements.
We had some fun with the post process effects and the soft contrast is possible by using a LUT correction. This is one of the features I love the most as a CG artist and it was the easiest way to match with the old blueprint at the basis.
And we would enjoy to make some cutouts, showing the inside of the fortress, this would be very fun for the users, but for now we are busy with others projects. But for sure it sounds like a great feature.
By the way I will be a little bit corporate : we should mention that this 3D reconstruction is a part of a city-time-travelling app’ called Time-Loop, also available with direct access (Paris here, with Bastille and… Notre-Dame without the burning effect - Notre-Dame static renders made by another part of our Axeon group).
[edit] ahah haven’t seen that sharp already talk about it…
, we want to be positioned for the patrimony market. We have 360 images, for example Notre-Dame in 
: we should mention that this 3D reconstruction is a part of a city-time-travelling app’ called 
- Notre-Dame static renders made by 