A very quick DWF impression of the structure for a small Anglo Saxon house can be found here. (As with any other DWF you will need the Autodesk Design Review software.) This model is based on a reconstruction at the Bentley Wildfowl and Motor Museum.

You can see the house is set into the ground lined with wood and the roof is made of fairly carefully placed straight branches woven together. The 'roof' would often then be covered with wooden tiles or bark or something that was similarly easy to find. The roof tiles are not shown in this diagram.

Some of the richer people in Anglo Saxon times might have had proper walls to their houses, but even fairly large houses would seem uncomfortable to us.

There is a rather clunky model of a cruck timber house in dwf format here. It is about 3.5Mb and takes a minute or so to load. It would be good to get time to build a better and more accurate model, but in the meantime this gives a reasonable impression although it is easy to spot some mistakes and some of the textures have suddenly become shiny and modern in appearance. I'm investigating, but at the time of writing I don't think that DWF viewer (now called Autodesk Design Review) work on 64 bit systems in ie 7 32 bit. That is, It works using Firefox but on a 64 bit Vista system using 32 bit IE 7 the model and viewer work locally (right click over the image or the link and select 'Save As'), but the model doesn't work when it is played in the browser. On a 32 bit XP system it works without any hassle.

The new Autodesk Design Review 2007 software has some good points and improves on the dwf viewer plugin, so if you can use this sort of model it is worth the rather large download (39MB) although Norton Antivirus describes the initial download as a low risk threat, presumably Autodesk are back to their old spyware tricks. (Discreet, part of Autodesk, previously used a type of spyware to track 3ds Max licences.) Casual users must remember that this plugin is a large download as it s is a professional architect and designer's tool.

I've always wanted to make a short film. So far I've only had time to make the low-rez title sequence. Here it is without most of the titles as a 1 minute long movie which will require the windows media player and here as a Flash animation..

 If I ever get time the end result will be about 12 minutes long. So far the story is written as are the storyboards. If anyone in the unusual position of a good knowledge of 3d software such as Maya, Max or the like and some time to spare and wants to help please get in touch. Or if someone just wants to nag me to get a move on do the same!

Bayleaf is a beautiful house at the excellent Weald and Downland museum. This is something like the Bayleaf timber structure (from memory) but without all the textures. Because of the 64 bit Director Shockwave problem I've used Wirefusion which requires Java. This model is only a proof of concept and will be checked for accuracy and have textures added in the near future, but it does give a basic idea of the main parts of the timber frame and, with a bit of imagination, what the final interaction might look like. 

Bayleaf itself is well worth visiting. The staff and volunteers at the museum are immensely knowledgeable and often they make sure there is someone with expert knowledge in the larger houses who is more than happy to chat to anyone passing through.