Lost stone city in the jungle

All 61 of the individual models in the pack, placed as one lost stone city in the jungle, 51 by 51 metres under an open sky. The city is invented: no real site is depicted, no real culture is claimed as its subject, and every glyph, mask and stela carving is an abstract shape rather than a script.

You start at the south edge of the paved plaza looking north up the processional axis at the stepped pyramid. Three stacked tiers and a summit shrine rise 18.8 metres out of the trees, climbed by three stair flights with serpent balustrade heads and a pair of jaguar statues at the foot. The pyramid is the backdrop and the silhouette: everything worth reading is at plaza level, where you walk.

West of the axis, an altar stone sits on a stepped plinth with offering bowls, an obsidian mirror stand, stone braziers and a serpent and a jaguar carved in stone. Standing torch posts, carved stelae, glyph panels and feathered serpent columns line the way in. A temple platform plinth carries a serpent statue on the north east side, reached by two processional stair flights.

East, the ball court runs twenty metres between its end markers, sloped walls on both sides with four stone rings set high on them, bench runs along the south side for the crowd and a colonnade of seven sections with wall torches behind the north wall. West of the plaza the ruin takes over: a standing wall run with a gate tower and a corbel arch doorway, then a collapsed compound of corner piers, toppled columns, fallen lintels, rubble piles and a stela on its face, with vine curtains hanging off what is left. A cenote well head stands over the water on the north west corner with a rope ladder, a winch drum, braziers and offerings on the rim.

An explorer camp is pitched inside the wall by the gate: two canvas tents, supply crates open and closed, a field table of notes, lanterns, a machete, bedrolls, a rope ladder on the wall and two theodolites on tripods. South of the plaza a gorge cuts the ground away and a single rope bridge spans it between two anchor towers, with a winch drum and torch posts at the near head and a small shrine terrace of a step platform, a stela, braziers and bowls on the far bank. Canopy trees, buttress root trees, strangler figs on ruin, palm saplings, ferns, undergrowth and fallen logs close the edge on every side.

What moves: the summit shrine doorway, the corbel arch doorway and the gate tower open and close as you come near, the ball court stone rings and the theodolite heads and the winch drums spin, the supply crates open, the obsidian mirror tilts, and the anchor tower gates open.

What does not move, and why: the vine curtains, the moss draped branches, the rope bridge deck and its sag, the canvas tents and the water in the cenote are all static. Flexible material needs a joint per element and the animation here is rigid node transforms, one per moving part, which cannot give cloth, rope or water a believable shape. There are no people and no animals either: the pack ships no skinned meshes, and the jaguar and the serpent are carved statues rather than creatures.

Every piece here is a published model from the pack, placed by hand. Walk with the keys or touch, and approach a piece to see it move if it has animation. Colliders, navigation and gameplay are yours to add.