PARIS, FR. (THECOUNT) — French investigators said on Thursday they now believe an ‘electrical short circuit’ was responsible for starting the fire which devastated Notre Dame cathedral earlier this week.
French officials are now promising to quickly rebuild the historic cathedral, and to aid in that reconstruction, an unlikely asset has emerged – near-perfect digital renderings including all its treasures as recently captured by at least two video game companies.
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With at least a billion dollars to be donated towards the restoration of the iconic cathedral located in Paris, France, the most difficult aspect of the effort will be the ensuring that restorational elements are as close to the original as possible.
Thank goodness there have been a few near-perfect computer models made of the famous cathedral, and these models could serve as blueprints for use on the daunting road ahead to restoration.
In 2014, the cathedral was digitally mapped by the video game company Ubisoft, for their 2014 release “Assassins Creed: Unity.” And in 2015, an exact digital replica of the building was modeled by the late architectural historian, Andrew Tallon. Tallon used lasers to map out the entire cathedral, using a computer to measure the time that it took for each laser to reach its target. reports TheMindUnleashed.
A large team at the company’s Montreal studio worked on the project, but a level designer named Caroline Miousse was the lead engineer on the Notre-Dame Cathedral. After the game was released, Miousse told The Verge that it took her about two years to complete the digital rendition of the building.
“She poured over photos to get the architecture just right, and worked with texture artists to make sure that each brick was as it should be. She even had historians help her figure out the exact paintings that were hanging on the walls.”
The process is further explained in the video below:
On 15 April 2019, just before 18:50 CEST, a fire broke out beneath the roof of Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris. By the time the fire was knocked down, fifteen hours later, the building’s spire and roof had collapsed and its interior, upper walls, and windows had been severely damaged, says wikipedia.
Even more extensive damage to the interior was prevented by the stone vaulted ceiling, which largely contained the burning roof as it collapsed. Many works of art and other treasures were evacuated early in the emergency, but many others were damaged or destroyed. The cathedral’s two pipe organs, and its three 13th-century rose windows, suffered little or no damage.