Dresden church

Last year, at another college, I spoke to my architecture history professor about my goals of learning 3D modeling in order to recreate, in virtual reality, historic buildings as they once looked, although they might be in ruins today. He cautioned me that this would be a highly specialized field, involving rare and unique projects -- and he was very interested and encouraging. He tracked down information on this project for me, and this is indeed the very kind of project I would love to be a part of.

http://members.aol.com/mstencel/clips/dresden.htm

The Church of Our Lady in Dresden, Germany was an 18th century masterpiece of architecture, but it was destroyed by bombing in World War II. It remained as ruins for years, but now a reconstruction effort is underway. The exterior restoration has been completed, thanks in part to a computer model that demonstrated the former appearance of the church.

Savannah College of Art and Design

http://www.scad.edu/academic/majors/arlh/about.cfm
Savannah College of Art and Design offers a degree in Architecture History which includes 3D computer modeling. Maybe I should check it out.

Reconstruction of Roman Empire baths

http://archpropplan.auckland.ac.nz/virtualtour/hadrians_bath/hadrians_bath.html

Ohio State - computer modeling of significant buildings

http://www.eng.ohio-state.edu/news/coe_news/nie/nie695/695_virtual.html

UCLA VR reconstructs Rome

UCLA is working on a project to reconstruct ancient Rome through virtual reality.

http://www.cvrlab.org/humnet/smm.html

Modeling historic architecture

Here is a computer modeling project that doesn't quite have the scope of the monumental buildings I envisioned working with, but shares the basic idea of preserving the past in digital form:

Inuit house

3DS Max

I'm gaining some experience modeling with the Doom 3 engine, however I find it somewhat cumbersome, with little available in the way of clear instructions.

It seems that 3DS Max is the industry standard for the kind of work I would like to do, and I don't want to waste time learning software that is not going to cut it. I hope this book will help me learn 3DS Max:

Foundation 3ds Max 8 Architectural Visualization by Brian L. Smith


They say this is the first book fever published specifically for architectural visualization with 3DS Max.

Doom Tutorials

I have started modeling in Doom. Here are some more web sites with tutorials on modeling with the Doom 3 engine:

http://www.modwiki.net/wiki/Image:D3square.png

http://blaze.spicelab.net/doom3

Modeling with the Doom engine

Here are some web sites that address 3D modeling with the Doom engine:
iddevnet.com/doom3
doom3world.org

King Kong

Architecture modeling was used in the film "King Kong."
http://www.cgarchitect.com/upclose/article1_CW.asp

I've always been interested in special effects for film, and would be interested in using 3D modeling in this way.

Architecture modeling

I'm interested in 3D modeling of historic architecture. The web site http://www.cgarchitect.com has some amazing examples of architectural computer visualization. Most of this work is done by architects. I'm never going to be an architect, so I hope that there will be opportunities in this field for computer artists.