A portrait of Tenochtitlan -3D reconstruction of the capital of the Aztec Empire | Hacker News Reader

A portrait of Tenochtitlan -3D reconstruction of the capital of the Aztec Empire

tenochtitlan.thomaskole.nl

74 pointsmaxweylandt12 comments

> To mark the ending of the 52-year cycle, all fires in the Basin of Mexico are extinguished and then lit again from a single source, in what is called the New Fire Ceremony.

we still have this tradition today, when social media sites become stale and a new one comes and is invite-only until it spreads to the whole society

This is magic, somebody give this guy a job at Bethesda or better some new really great role playing game company. These kind of maps are why I like open world games.

Memory lane: the same Tenochtitlan was reconstructed in VRML back in the late 90’s…

http://www.dellerae.com/tenoch/

The city that never ends getting reconstructed, in a way!

My naive mind thought "wow I would love to go visit this city, how has no one recommended this to me yet?"

Then the 500-year spoiler hit, and I lamented the loss of a culture I never knew. A city in a lake, covered in tarmac.

there are still traces left there. Even thought they suffered a cruel fate no doubt, you experience much more of the original culture in Mexico than say in CA, where all this stuff just vanished (or wasnt as big to begin with). And the Yucatan for example is still populated to a large degree by the same people as before, with their own language. Love to visit.

I would love to know which software was used on this project. Amazing!

They're over here [0], if you want to try and ask some questions!

[0] https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@thomas_kole/1109968242633959...

The author's mastodon account has a couple of examples of the creation process if you go back through their post history a bit. It seems they used Blender for everything (as far as I can tell).

They also posted a lot about the entire process at blenderartists.org, and have apparently been working on this since February 2022!

https://blenderartists.org/t/tenochtitlan-wip/1360197

Amazing.

I am skeptical of the number of trees. I can see how they would have plenty of them but that amount seems unrealistic. Was it some sort of agriculture?

If you are doing flood control, given the somewhat swampy nature of the surroundings, then having a lot of trees would make sense to keep things dry. They would also help keep things cool during the height of summer, so it is not unthinkable that they would have nurtured a lot of them as part of the city.

this is absolutely incredible. if you go to Ling Ling on Reforma, you'll get a view from the 56th story of Chapultepec Uno and you can still see how the main roads correspond to the causeways in these reproductions. you can almost see how the modern city was overlaid on the ancient one

really really cool. I always wanted to see how zocalo looked back then, with the lake in the distance

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