Step inside a 17th century painting through this remarkable 3D rendering

Sometimes there can be more life hidden within a 2D image than we think: artist Zsolt Ekho Farkas rendered Gyula Benczúr’s painting The Recapture of Buda in 1686 in a 3D frame, producing a video that lets viewers almost walk through the painting and experience bloodshed in chilling detail. The process was laborious: first, Ekho analyzed the original to see how the characters were positioned in 3D space. Then he made each character into a ready-to-animate figure, placing textures and painting over them to match the original work of art. After over two months of work, the project consists of more than 8.5 million polygons — giving the video a resolution so high that it had to be recut many times to avoid choppiness on most computers. It’s a remarkable, albeit time-consuming process, but it could be a way for museums to accentuate old art with new technologies in the future.