Assassin’s Creed Unity May Help Restore Notre Dame

On Monday, April 15, a large portion of Notre Dame Cathedral was devastated by fire, destroying much of the structure’s internal woodwork, roof and the structure’s iconic spire. 

French President, Emmanuel Macron has stated that he plans to have the structure restored within the next five years, with a number of French and foreign tycoons and business leaders already pledging million of Euros to assist in the project. 

To recreate Notre Dame, architects will need access to as much data as possible on the structure, which means that a large number of photographs and videos will need to be analysed in order to make an accurate copy of the original’s structure. Thankfully, Notre Dame has something that’s better than mere photos and video to look over, as accurate 3D models of the structure already exist. 

When adding the structure to Assassin’s Creed Unity, Ubisoft developed a highly accurate model of the Notre Dame cathedral, acting as the game’s largest structure. In an interview with The Verge in 2014, it was confirmed that Ubisoft’s artists “spent literally years” fussing over the details of the building, ensuring that “each brick was as it should be”. 

On the topic of 3D models, several other sources of information exist, with the historians at National Geographic having created a laser scanned model of the internal structure of the cathedral, taking scans over more than 50 locations to collect over 1 billion points of data.