A new game. Read the intro and name that company. With the resurrection of views that vanished 200 years ago, the demolished architectural splendor of the 11th Century Abbey of St Peter and Paul – better known as the Cluny monastery – has been reborn through a multi-image video presentation in the ruins of the old abbey, the Cluny’s Ochier Museum, located some 225 miles south of Paris. It could only be IBM telling us that over the past two years three engineering graduates from France’s Ecole Nationale Superieure des Arts et Metiers have been reconstructing a model of the Abbey, using RS/6000 workstations and computer-aided design software. Apparently employed daily by hundreds of users in manufacturing, public works, construction, research and design and other urban planning areas, IBM’s Computer Aided Design and three-dimensional Catia software tools refigured what was once unsurpassed in architectural majesty – although St Peter’s Basilica in Rome, built four centuries later, is larger, adds IBM, rather reproachfully. Most of the plans, sections and crossviews lacked any indication of scale, but by working out the likely proportions of the Abbey from measurements that existed from site excavations, the engineering students reconstructed the abbey in three months with Catia on the computer screen. Because of the size and value of existing drawings, the floor plans were not transportable from the Cluny museum and the team entered measurements at the site with a portable PS/2.
Animated
The software built a two-dimensional blueprint which highlighted discrepancies regarding the construction, enabling the project team to double check on-site theoretical measurements against actual measurements. Catia then changed the plan into a three-dimensional model. A further eight weeks was spent converting the Catia database into TDImage software from Dassault Systemes that produces animated three-dimensional images. In all, a dozenRS/6000s were used over 29 weeks to compute some 5,285 images and the presentation was awarded top prize in the multi-image section at the European Festival of Company Image in Biarritz, France.
