3D Reconstruction of the Dnipro Valley Before the Kremenchuk Reservoir

3D terrain animations of the Dnipro valley before the Kremenchuk Reservoir, for the documentary series "Gone with the Water".

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Maps and 3D terrain animations for the documentary series Gone with the Water, reconstructing the Dnipro river valley flooded by the Kremenchuk Reservoir. The animated fragments appear in episode 1 (07:12–07:52).

The reconstruction is part of a long-term research project: publicly available sources on the pre-flood valley are scarce, and the map is refined year by year. The current stage covers the main riverbed and the centres of the submerged settlements; detailed town and village layouts are planned for future iterations. Settlements were located and verified from archive maps, georeferenced in QGIS and vectorized manually — the longest stage of the work. With no planning or terrain detail available at this stage, a minimalist model was chosen as the concept.

No elevation data finer than SRTM (30 m per pixel) exists for the area, so the terrain was interpolated to 10 m per pixel and reprojected to EPSG:32636 (WGS 84 / UTM zone 36N). The historical riverbed was added to the digital terrain model and adjusted against surrounding elevation values. The relief was modeled and textured in Blender; settlement names were exported from QGIS, refined in Inkscape, and composited into the Blender scene.

Documentary series “Gone with the Water” · Idea and direction: Oleksii Khutornyi

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