Inventio – Compostella Dicitur – Túbal Villar

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The new home for the Pilgrimage and Santiago Museum opened its doors with the exclusive exhibition Compostella Dicitur. The Cathedral’s City. In it, the XIII Century Santiago de Compostela has been recreated, through interactive applications and virtual reconstructions that allow to experience the look and urban development of the city, or to impersonate a pilgrim in his way through the medieval Compostela. Moreover, large screen displays recreate the looks of the romanic cathedral, as it was seen by those who were there at its consecration, in 1211 AD. Framed historically accurate recreations of the era monuments, by Juan Carlos Abraldes, who also modeled the amazing 3d sculptures and textures of the characters and monuments of the exhibition. To finish it all, a 20 m2 model miniature reconstruct the physiognomy of XIII C. Santiago, with the romanic cathedral in all its detail, the churches and monasteries, the gates and the walls… In accomplishing all this, descriptions from the Codex Calixtinus and other historical documents were followed.

As part of the Ficcion Producciones CG Department at the time, as 3d generalist, I started by taking part in the shading of dozens of props that had been created prior to me joining the project.
From that moved on to model many of the props myself, form tools and buildings… once the team was scaled down, from what could have been intended to be the original idea of a full blown video game, to its final implementation: an over-the-top virtual recreation with AAA effects in the corner of a small museum, running on a beast of gaming rig, hidden inside a white box, I was then able to take all those assets, under the technical direction of Javier Fernández Ramiro, and import them to UDK, where I had free reign to recreate the hold landscape, based on topological data, and basically build the hold city from the ground up, adding flora, fauna, and the everyday-day life of a medieval city, that was then streamlined into a playable level design by the team.

At the time, we had a prototype Unity build, that was implemented by Iker García Santander, with an outside model of the cathedral, half-way on its construction (circa XII C.), I was committed to take those foundations into the final, full shaded model of the finished thing, using medieval blueprints, and filling the gaps with time-accurate props and settings. The lighting of the sets, was a joint effort of me and Javier, with me pushing the realism, and him making it possible, while making sure we didn’t burn down the museum…