Portraying a site with as long a history as Isthmia is challenging. Under Broneer's directorship, many architectural plans were made and published in Isthmia I & II (O. Broneer, Isthmia, I, The Temple of Poseidon (Princeton 1971); Isthmia, II, Topography and Architecture (Princeton 1973)). From 1989 to1992, Fritz Hemans produced traditional black & white plans of the contemporary excavations. He also produced a series of contour plans representing each of nine phases, from the 8th century B.C. to the 2nd century A.D. Two-dimensional plans, however, do not easily illustrate discussions of the sanctuary's complex archaeological record.
In 1993, Archaeological Graphic Services began to develop a series of 3-dimensional models which would compliment the 2-dimensional plans. Building upon Hemans' contour plans, each period's surface was generated separately in order to show the transformation of the terrace, the stadium embankment and other features.
First, the contour plans were scanned. Each scanned image was opened with Raster Overlay ESP Version 4.0*, which runs within AutoCAD (Release 12) and allows raster images to be displayed in an AutoCAD drawing. The contours were then digitized (traced) as vector polylines. Points were added representing spot elevations, relevant to each phase. In this manner, a three-dimensional database (in the form of an AutoCAD drawing file) was built for each time period.
Next, Quicksurf (Version 5.1) , also working within AutoCAD, operated on the files. Quicksurf reads X, Y & Z data and generates surface grids according to parameters specified by the user. The resulting grid can be saved as surface entities recognized by AutoCAD.
Once the surface terrains were done, the architecture was contructed. Based on the archaeological record, the temple, theater and other features were constructed within AutoCAD.
When the architecture was finished, it was combined with the surface grid, and the models were essentially complete.
Finally, AccuRender (Version 2.1) was invoked (again, within AutoCAD) to assign materials to the surfaces and to produce the rendered images.
Some images were modified for the Isthmia Web pages using Photoshop (Version 3.0.5).