BBC2 Ancient Britain Series Maps

WHM70

Hello,

I wanted to share some work I did with the help of Global Mapper. Last night saw the first broadcast of A History of Ancient Britain on BBC2. This was the first of 8 shows. I animated about 10 minutes of 3D maps for the shows. I've put together a reel of many of the maps here: http://vimeo.com/19713691

My background is in animation and filmmaking so GIS is not my strong point. I'm sure many of you may find inaccuracies with the work, but I hope that won't detract from them too much. Among the challenges of the job was to simulate the thousands of years of flooding and erosion which saw Britain become an island, whereas it had been firmly connected to mainland Europe.

I used Global Mapper to find imagery and elevation data. Since I had to create landmasses which no longer exist above water, I also searched for terrain which I could patch together.

The animation and rendering were handled in Cinema 4D using the VRAY renderer. The earth's surface is a simple 10x10 polygon mesh. The elevation (which is probably over exaggerated) comes from an SRTM greyscale image driving sub-polygon displacement in the renderer.

I hope you like them. And if you're into archaeology - or even geology - you'd probably enjoy the series too.

Thanks for such a useful - and friendly - piece of software.

Best wishes,

Will MacNeil

PaulTocknell

Here's the video. Nice job!

[video=vimeo;19713691]