Case study · Immersive museum

Ephesus Experience Museum Three rooms, one temple.

Fourteen minutes of immersive film across three rooms — built with historians, rendered at 116 megapixels a frame, on a render farm we had to build ourselves.

Venue: Ephesus Experience Museum, Selçuk
Our role: Design, 3D content and rendering
Year: 2024
Duration: 8 months
360° hall: 27693×3577 walls + 4096×4096 floor
Render: In-house, 40× RTX 4090

The Artemis of Ephesus in a colonnaded hall, red ribbons streaming across the full panorama — A frame from the 360° hall, unwrapped flat. On the wall it surrounds the audience completely.

The space

Three rooms, three scales.

Visitors move through three rooms, each a different kind of canvas. We designed and produced the content for all of them.

Room one · 180°A five-minute film on a wraparound wall.
Room two · 360°The main hall: an eight-minute film on walls of 27693×3577 pixels, with a 4096×4096 projected floor beneath the audience.
Room three · ArtemisA one-to-one replica of the Artemis of Ephesus statue, surrounded by vertical LED monoliths — a one-minute finale.

Previsualisation: visitors in a long room whose walls dissolve from particles into a sunset landscape — Room one, previsualised: a sunset landscape breaking apart into particles along the walls.

Previsualisation of the 360° hall: visitors among projected statues and a colonnaded courtyard

Previsualisation of the 360° hall: a marble arcade with statues in soft grey light

The 360° hall, previsualised before production.

Accuracy

Built with historians.

We worked alongside historians throughout. Every asset — architecture, costume, armour, the statue itself — had to be historically consistent, not just beautiful.

The Artemis of Ephesus was sculpted detail by detail, from the crown to the reliefs on her chest, before a single frame was lit.

Grey sculpt of the Artemis of Ephesus: crown, face and relief-covered collar

Grey sculpt of the Artemis statue showing her arms and the rows of ovoid forms on her chest

The finished Artemis statue in gold and marble before the glowing Temple of Artemis — The finished statue, in front of the Temple of Artemis.

A bronze-armoured Greek hoplite with a short sword

A Roman gladiator with helmet and trident

A priestess statue holding a laurel branch, dissolving into golden particles

Character assets, each checked for period accuracy.

Month one

Find the language first.

We spent the first month on design exploration only: picking key scenes and testing what we could do with them. Production started once the style was set.

Below, seven material studies for a single figure.

Seven versions of the same priestess statue in gold, bronze, marble and dark stone

The hard part

A world that comes apart.

The biggest challenge was moving a camera through the 360° hall. The look we wanted had a solid centre and edges — and a floor — that dissolve into drifting points.

So we had to model our own 3D world, render it, and then effectively 3D-scan it back. We rendered each shot in 360°, used the normal and position passes to turn the entire world into a point cloud in Houdini, and simulated those points. Every shot was rendered twice: once as mesh, once as particles. Getting that system to work was one of the hardest parts of the project.

Drag across the image to compare.

A sunset lake landscape panorama rendered as solid geometry

The same panorama with its edges blowing apart into particles

The landscape rebuilt as a point cloud: hills, grass and river made of millions of points — The point-cloud pass on its own: the same world, rebuilt from points and ready to simulate.

Previsualisation: walls of the room made of drifting sand-coloured particles, a column dissolving at the far end

Previsualisation: a wave of orange particles sweeping along the walls

The story

The night the temple burned.

The 360° film builds to the burning of the Temple of Artemis. Legend says the goddess couldn't protect her temple that night — she was away, attending the birth of Alexander the Great.

Artemis lifting a newborn child above her head in front of the temple

The temple's colonnade standing empty, its outer columns crumbling into dust — The goddess is gone. The temple stands empty.

A hooded figure with a torch walking between dissolving columns

The darkened colonnade with the first flames glowing at its far end

The colonnade engulfed in flames and embers — The fire spreads through the colonnade.

The temple's centre collapsing into a cascade of particles between burning columns

The temple façade dissolving into swirling golden particles around its doorway — What remains turns to dust.

Previsualisation: the room's walls in flames and embers as the temple burns

Rendering

When render farms said no, we built one.

Commercial render farms either quoted prices that made the project impossible, or rendered a few frames and refunded us — they couldn't handle the scenes.

So we built our own: 20 machines, each with two RTX 4090s and 128 GB of RAM, linked together with Deadline. We rendered throughout the six months of production, and then spent the final month doing nothing but rendering.

Month 1Design exploration

Months 2–7Production, rendering continuously alongside

Month 8Final render

116megapixels per frame

40RTX 4090 GPUs, in-house

20render nodes, 128 GB each

14minutes of film, 3 rooms

8months

In the museum

At Ephesus.

The Ephesus Experience Museum sits beside the ancient city at Selçuk.

The entrance walkway of the Ephesus Experience Museum — Museum entrance. Photo: S. Ciampone.

The film

Watch it.

Credits

Who did what.

Venue: Ephesus Experience Museum, Selçuk
Design, 3D content & rendering: Nongravital
Historical consultancy: Historians working with the project
Tools: Cinema 4D, Houdini, ZBrush, Octane, Redshift, Deadline
Photography: S. Ciampone

Museum or immersive space in the works?

History deserves more than a screen. We build the room.

Start a project More on immersive rooms Next case study: Riyadh Air