Ruins to 3-D riches: recreating the Khmers

Tom Chandler on the animations of ancient life at Angkor: "What we're trying to do is to demonstrate how Cambodian culture and history might be visualised and interpreted with this technology." (Photo: Eddie Jim)

February 26, 2007
The Age (Australia)

Archaeology and technology combine to take students back to the ancient city of Angkor, writes Geoff Maslen.

WHEN Tom Chandler first saw the ancient Cambodian city of Angkor and its wonderful temple six years ago, it set him on a path that has led to the re-creation of the city as it was 1000 years ago.

Using the latest in 3-D modelling and computer game technology, Mr Chandler and his team at Monash University have built a visual and interactive program that allows people to see how the ancient Khmers lived.

A quick stopover in Cambodia on his way back to Australia from Britain, where he had been working as an art director and graphic designer, turned into a six-month sojourn for him. Captivated by the land of the Khmer, he returned regularly to Cambodia.

After he began teaching 3-D animation and graphics at Monash's faculty of information technology, Mr Chandler decided to use his multimedia skills to capture Angkor as it was and then make it available to a wider audience.

"In 2002, I linked up with the University of Sydney's Greater Angkor Wat project, where a large team of archaeologists and other researchers are investigating Angkor and how its decline and collapse came about," Mr Chandler says. "Since then I have also worked with the Monash Asia Institute in researching visualisations of Angkorian civilisation, especially ancient urban and agricultural landscapes and architecture, but also scenes of daily life, warfare and the royal court."

Using high-range 3-D graphic software similar to that used to produce animated sequences and special effects in recent motion pictures and computer games, Mr Chandler and his graduate students have developed a range of short animations and an extensive library of digital models. He says the project has implications for the way history is interpreted, while it could also have strong commercial interest for the tourism, educational multimedia, broadcast and computer-gaming industries.

But as any animator knows, the process is enormously time-consuming. Not just the research to get accurate archaeological and historical information, but also the creation of virtual images. Mr Chandler says that producing a 45-second animation, even to achieve a reasonably accurate result, requires many reviews by experts in the field and takes a small team of his graduate students several months to complete.

In the popular imagination, Angkor is a place of ruins and broken statues being swallowed up by a forest. One animation re-creates an ancient battle scene with colours and sound to show a lively, dynamic city.

"Though many students might have heard of the temple of Angkor Wat, the civilisation of Angkor remains unfamiliar territory," Mr Chandler says.

"A great deal of emphasis in the school curriculum deals with the classic civilisations of Rome, Greece and Egypt, whereas Angkor, even though it lies much closer to home, has received much less attention. This may soon change as many high-school teachers now holiday to South-East Asia and they know about Angkor. It's time their students did too."

Archaeologists and historians have established that Angkor was a thriving metropolis between the 9th and 14th centuries, before its mysterious collapse. All that remains are the stone ruins of hundreds of temples, including the World Heritage-listed Angkor Wat, the largest in the world.

In his research, Mr Chandler drew on art history and archaeological data, photography, historical maps, satellite imagery and advice from international experts to re-create the city as it was in AD1000. Textile experts helped to visualise the colours of the ancient fabrics.

Last year, he was invited to Cambodia's Norton University as a senior visiting fellow to introduce a group of computer science and architecture students to specialised 3-D modelling and animation techniques. The aim of the continuing project is to train Cambodian digital designers and multimedia experts to digitally render their own history and their own heritage using 3-D animation.

"Knowing these highly technical skills offers Cambodians the opportunity to tell their own stories," Mr Chandler says. "What we're trying to do is to demonstrate how Cambodian culture and history might be visualised and interpreted in Khmer with this technology.

"These visions of the past are not limited only to historical reconstructions. In fact, 3-D animations are best at recreating things that lie in the popular imagination of the past rather than the archaeological one - in myths, folklore and legends."

Mr Chandler completed his undergraduate degree in archaeology but later travelled overseas to work in the interactive design industry. Now he says he has returned to put those skills together and has opened up new avenues for bringing the past back to life.

LINK: angkor.com