Rendering

Our work on the Herculaneum Amazon is a collaboration with Warwick University. Professor Alan Chalmers, head of WMG’s visualisation team and an expert in ultra-realistic graphics, will take the digitally re-painted computer model and apply techniques to exactly reproduce the lighting and environmental conditions under which the painted statue would have originally been created and displayed.

Beyond the work we do at the ACRG our colleagues at Warwick are at the cutting edge of computer graphics research. Whilst we use as a matter of course software employed within the film industry, Warwick and their partners are busy writing the computer graphics algorithms for the films and games of the future. The computer graphics world is very often seeking visual accuracy, through physical simulation, and it is exactly this that archaeology and cultural heritage in general has so much to benefit from. It is now comparatively easy to produce computer graphics that look right but this project is all about making them look right because all the elements - the geometry, the paint, the lighting, the environment, the surrounding decoration and so on - operate in a physically accurate way. Otherwise archaeological interpretation will be flawed and the conservation record impaired.