Potomac River Gorge near Chain Bridge ca 1864

3D Model

This is a 3D model of the Potomac River valley near Chain Bridge as it may have appeared during the Civil War. It is based on a mesh developed in CloudCompare from lidar data and modified in ZBrush to remove obvious 20th-century landscape features. A low-polygon version of the mesh was retopologized in ZBrush, while a high-polygon version was used to prepare a normal map in Maya. A portion of maps prepared by the Army Corps of Engineers in 1864 in the collections of the National Archives is overlaid on the model; these show the relationship of the Civil War fortifications to the bridge.