Portus Modelling Workshop

As part of the Portus project we held a workshop today to discuss progress on the 3d recording and modelling of some of the Portus buildings. We concentrated on the Navalia and the Grandi Magazzini di Settimio Severo today. Simon Keay started by talking about the current state of archaeological knowledge concerning these buildings, the history of research and the interpretations growing from our project. Next Penny Copeland described the 3d data available via the various geophysical, photogrammetric, laser scan and total station surveys.

Christina Triantafillou explored the architectural parallels and interpretations for the buildings. Matthew Harrison discussed the possibilities afforded by procedural modelling tools such as CityEngine and demonstrated results on simulating the Navalia. He then gave a presentation on behalf of James Miles on the possibilities of structural analysis. Finally Grant Cox described the process of taking the results of the procedural modelling and other interpretative processes to build photorealistic representations. Together the workshop demonstrated the potential for feedback through modelling and discussion as a core part of archaeological interpretation, where the process is in many cases the most valuable part of computer modelling but the results are also rather beautiful and insightful in their own right. Lots more Portus fun to come.