A 3D model of my great-grandfather's farmstead, rebuilt from my mom's memories

I’m still experimenting with Astra, OpenAI’s new model.

My great-grandfather and great-grandmother on my mom’s side lived in a small village in Vyatka, a region in the northeast of European Russia. Their log house and farmyard have been gone since the 1980s. I never got to visit, and hardly any photos survive. So why not try to bring the place back?

I asked my mom to remember what the farmyard looked like and sketch it on a sheet of paper.

Then I asked the model to turn her sketch, plus my notes on it, into a plan of the farmyard, and then build a 3D model from that plan. I also told it not to rely on the sketch and the plan alone, but to draw on research into how Russian peasant farmsteads in Vyatka were laid out, and on photos of other farmyards and carved window frames in the same village.

Codex (OpenAI’s coding agent) rummaged around for a while, browsed Rodnaya Vyatka, a local history website about the region, read a few books, and built a website where you can spin the house around and even walk through the yard. Take a look here.

But I didn’t stop there. I asked it to make a proper architectural visualization in Blender (a 3D graphics program) with more realistic materials. A bit more rummaging, and it came back with something even cooler.

Next, I’ll go over the result with my mom, and based on what she says, we’ll tweak it some more with Codex.

Why do this?

Besides the thrill of stepping into a time machine, a model you can walk around in really helps jog the memory. While you talk it through, you can add details to the picture of the past that were hard to pull out of memory any other way.

And as a bonus, Astra and I made a couple of images of the farmyard in the style of the photographers who worked in the region. In this case, the reference was the work of Sergei Lobovikov, a Vyatka photographer who captured peasant life in the early 20th century.