Pedro de Azambuja Varela

Architectural models are usually very good at representing space and rather bad at representing time. We can model a wall, a roof or an entire building in detail, but it is much harder to ask a simple historical question: what existed here in 1700?

Historical Time is a small experimental add-on I developed for Blender. It assigns a creation year and, when relevant, a destruction year to each object. A document date can then be changed to explore the model through time.

The aim is not to replace archaeological stratigraphy, HBIM or richer systems such as the Extended Matrix. Those approaches can describe sources, activities, uncertainty and relationships between historical units much more rigorously. Historical Time occupies an earlier and lighter stage of research: it lets us assign provisional dates, test interpretations visually and discover useful historical phases while working directly with the model.

The basic idea

An object created in 1700 and destroyed in 1850 is visible during that interval. An object without a destruction date continues to exist after its creation. Objects without dates remain explicitly undated rather than being silently assigned an arbitrary year.

The document can be viewed in two ways:

• Year shows what existed at one particular moment.
• Period shows every object that existed at any time within a selected interval.

The viewport also has three explicit modes:

• Historical filters the model using the selected year or period.
• All temporarily shows the complete model.
• Undated Only isolates objects that still need temporal information.

What it can do

• Assign dates directly to one or many selected objects.
• Use a blank Created or Destroyed field to mean that the corresponding date is not defined.
• Filter the viewport by a single year or by a period.
• Colour objects by creation year without changing their materials.
• Display date tags over objects.
• Display the current year or period in the viewport and in rendered images.
• Import dates from configurable Blender custom properties, including GIS-style fields such as start_date and end_date.
• Import .cpt colour palettes and store them inside the .blend file.
• Animate the document year with keyframes and use Blender’s normal Render Animation command.

The date information is stored as visible Blender Custom Properties. This keeps the model relatively open: the data can be inspected without the add-on and provides a possible bridge to GIS, Rhino, SketchUp, IFC or other workflows.

Download

The add-on requires Blender 4.4 or later and is released under the GNU General Public License v3.0 or later.

Installation

1. Download historical_time-0.18.0.zip and keep it zipped.
2. In Blender, open Edit → Preferences.
3. Open Get Extensions or Add-ons, depending on the Blender version.
4. Use the menu in the top-right corner and choose Install from Disk….
5. Select the downloaded ZIP file.
6. Enable Historical Time if Blender does not enable it automatically.
7. Return to the 3D View, press N to open the sidebar, and choose the Historical Time tab.

First use

1. Select one or several objects.
2. Under Selected Objects, enter a year in Created.
3. If the object ceased to exist, enter a year in Destroyed; otherwise leave it blank.
4. Under Document Time, choose Year and enter the date you want to inspect.
5. Select Historical to filter the model.
6. Try Period when the research question concerns an interval rather than one instant.
7. Under Visualisation, optionally enable creation-year colours, date tags or the large document date.

When editing an object that falls outside the current date, Keep selected objects visible prevents it from disappearing while it is selected. For an incomplete model, Undated Only is a quick way to find the objects that still need dates.

Animation and rendering

The document year can be animated like another Blender property:

1. Move to the first frame and enter the starting year.
2. Hover over the Year field and press I to insert a keyframe.
3. Move to the final frame, enter the ending year and insert another keyframe.
4. Set the interpolation in Blender’s Graph Editor. Linear interpolation produces a continuous chronological progression.
5. Use Blender’s standard Render → Render Animation command.

Historical object visibility and the optional date display are evaluated during the native render process. The creation-year colour treatment is a viewport overlay and does not replace the objects’ materials.

Current scope

Historical Time deliberately uses a minimal temporal model: Created, optional Destroyed, and a document Year or Period. It does not yet represent uncertain dates, competing hypotheses, historical sources or stratigraphic relationships.

That limitation is also part of the experiment. Instead of demanding a complete historical data structure before visualisation begins, the add-on allows chronology to emerge through interaction with the model. A more formal system can follow once the historical interpretation becomes sufficiently stable.

Historical Time 0.18.0 was developed through rapid testing in real architectural models. It remains experimental software, so working on a copy of an important Blender file is recommended.

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Author: Pedro Varela
Version: 0.18.0
Platform: Blender 4.4+
License: GPL-3.0-or-later