Rapid reconstruction of historical urban landscape: The surroundings of Czech chateaux and castles

Modern digital techniques of contemporary cartography allow us to study changes in the landscape character with the use of tools primarily designed for geomatics science. Old maps and plans can be scanned, georeferenced and vectorised and historical photographs can be geocoded in the GIS environment, and thus experienced users can get an idea about the landscape character throughout history from these data sources. However, a lot of users from the general public are not familiar with the language of maps, especially the old ones, and are not able to understand the landscape appearance from 2D datasets only. For that reason, 3D modelling can be very beneficial because 3D models can significantly improve users' experience gained from the portrayed landscape situations. This article presents a complete workflow of landscape model creation based on old maps, plans, drawings and photographs. The described approach employs a combination of GIS techniques, 3D CAD software and procedural modelling tools and aims to maximally exploit datasets which are processed for the purposes of a classical 2D web mapping application. The main goal of this research is not to create highly-precise models, but rather to provide simple though credible visualisations, from which even less-experienced users could identify the urban landscape character in history and its changes in time.