Behind the Scenes: True Size of a Mongol Army

Hello, Patrons! I wanted to give you all an exclusive sneak peak of our upcoming True Size video on the Mongol Army. Our researcher Sophia has been working on building the storyboard and script for the video.

According to Sophie, “building historically accurate models means that most of the time no one is wearing cool armor, so I let myself get a little wild with this stand-in who represents a defector from Jin China” and she personally enjoys the look of lamellar armor.

Here's an example of translating 3D scene (below) design into a 2D space. Getting everything right for the True Size (TTS) is tricky and often takes a lot of revisions and changes, especially since working in a 3D space adds a lot of considerations that you don't normally face when writing history. For example, in the upcoming Mongolian episode, Sophie needed to design the Mongolian line of march as well as their supply chain. None of these things are really talked about so she's been mostly left alone with her cubes and her experience with other 3D supply designs.

Sophie continues, "that was how we came across the native Mongolian herding dog, known as the Bankhar, which almost certainly accompanied traveling Mongolian forces, but to Sophie's knowledge, is not mentioned in secondary sources.

A lot of historical nuance gets lost when we transfer things from research document to script. We have to keep our work simple so that average people can access it and understand it. This simple slide below is the distillation of nearly 4 pages of research:

The Roman Imperial Legion was our first foray into 3D design and direction, which meant that it suffered from a lot of bloat. The design team batted ideas around for 4 months before we settled on what we wanted to do and how we wanted to do it. And the sheer complexity of the Roman Legion presented its own unique hurdles. We were revising the script and generating new art all the way up to release."

Designing the Castra was a pretty big undertaking. It took Sophie a week and a half to collect all the necessary sources for dimensions and visual references. She decided to base it on a recreation on the Caerleon fortress in Wales, which has some very well preserved foundations.

Sophie says, "it's a good thing that we never got too close to my castra, because my buildings certainly aren't the best."

Of course, the episode you saw was spread across a vast area, but when Sophie was putting it all together they kept it tight for ease of review.

That's it for now, we hope you all enjoy this BTS post. True Size of the Mongolian Army is set to be released near the end of this month. Hope y'all are as hyped as we are. :)