At university I was introduced to an ongoing project for the historic town of Malmesbury, The town wants to develop an application that allows tourists both on the ground and online to visit the town as it was in the days of old. The Abbey was the central hub of the town and can be explored in it's current state here: https://my.matterport.com/show/?m=95nMc59XGzV
The team headed by Richard Campbell, was extremely enthusiastic, and for the project, we were asked to construct a number of Anglo-Saxon and Medieval building assets with which to populate the app. I undertook the making of the Anglo-Saxon Mint and St Mary's Church in a piece of software called Blender which involved much research and conceptual visualisation because there were no records of how either of these buildings looked.
Malmesbury's Mint is currently used in a video and in other promotional material:
St. Mary’s Church, St Michael's and St Paul's chapel were all in close proximity and this involved collaboration with various team members to decide on position, size and historical authenticity:
I was given the responsibility of bringing all of the finished models into Unreal Engine 4 in which the Explore Malmesbury application was being made. This project involved a number of challenges including gathering the finished models and importing them into Unreal Engine, which came with a number of unseen difficulties because the file conversions corrupted the original models. This meant that they had to be reconstructed and retextured before being imported correctly into Unreal Engine. The task of organizing this transfer of separate assets into this single Unreal Engine scene fell to myself.
Despite the difficulties of organizing and overcoming the problems as they arose, as well as the issue of modelling the buildings themselves, this project was completed by the required deadline and to the satisfaction of the client Richard Campbell who leads the overall development of Explore Malmesbury.
I also provided Malmesbury Town Council with a fly-through video footage made in Unreal Engine and cleaned up in Adobe Premier Pro for the various buildings made in the prior semester. Finally, I created an animated Benedictine monk as the first of many NPCs that will hopefully populate the Explore Malmesbury app. I hope to work more towards the development of this application as it has awoken within me an enthusiasm for using my digital skills in the heritage industry to help breathe life into the history that I am so passionate about.
Tomos Jackson - 3D Environments [Game and Heritage] student, Winchester University. Contact: tomos.jackson@start2finish.ltd