Ralph Treswell's 1587 Map of Kettering Brought to Life
This animation is based on a map made by Ralph Treswell in 1587 on behalf of Sir Christopher Hatton. I love the style of the houses on his map and wanted to see what it might feel like if it was a 3d environment that could be explored. The direction of the light in the scene was based on the tree shadows from the original map.
Northamptonshire Archives Service have kindly given me permission to share this image of the original map that the animation is based on. (Reference FH272 Maps of the property of Lord Chancellor Hatton 1580_84 Ketteringe map).
The landscape was created using Lidar to match the area of the original map to the town so that it was as accurate as possible. I used the church and main roads as reference as they have not changed much.
The landscape was smoothed and texture painted. The rise and fall of the land in that area hasn't changed much so it made it easier to imagine how it might have felt to walk around in it.
Ralph Treswell doesn't draw a mill on the Kettering map but he labels an area as mill hill and the town would have needed at least one mill so I decided to include one to make the town feel more complete.
Cropped images of Treswell's Holdenby maps showing the mill and the man that were used as reference. Shared here with kind permission from Northamptonshire Archives Service (Ref FH272 Maps of the property of Lord Chancellor Hatton 1580_65 and 1580_6).
This was a test to show that the full scale environment could be taken into Unreal Engine to be explored.
The height of the rabbits on the map were fairly similar to the men so I thought it would be fun to keep them that way and add a little camera shake. The men on the Northamptonshire maps were all left handed so I made sure to stay true to that.
The swans are based on the ones from Ralph Treswell's Purbeck survey
No deer are shown on the Kettering map but they feature on his other Northamptonshire maps so I decided to include one right at the edge of the map because the town was quite close to a forest.
The houses walls and gates all match the scale that they were drawn on the map so the scales look quite big, for the gates especially.