Using 3D Game Engines in Architecture? 22
Mentor asks: "Recently, a very promising young architect asked me to give her some ideas for a design presentation she has to do concerning a new building in Germany. Instead of making another dull non-interactive flyby-drivethrough 3dmax-movie, I suggested using the Halflife or Quake engine to precreate the whole building, and let visitors of the exhibition experience the building firsthand, being a player in it, and interacting with the building (without any actual weapons of course :)). I was wondering whether this has been done a lot already . Does anyone have any tips?" I would think that most 3D engines have evolved enough where something like this might actually be practical. Thoughts?
Slightly OT but... (Score:1)
been there done that (Score:5, Funny)
Lighting and detail issues (Score:4, Informative)
You will also have trouble showing the great detail of your work with a game engine. With a pre-rendered demonstration, you can focus attention to whatever you like, and can take things out of their context to show them more closely (e.g. breaking apart a dining chair into its individual legs and screws).
In short, it would certainly be a novel way to show your stuff, but not necessary an efficient one. You might want to try rendering multiple camera paths/angles and make it semi-interactive (think Myst), that could allow the client to see in-depth views of what interests them most. Just a thought.
How about "new" engines? (Score:1)
One note about faking: in Unreal Tournament, the editor raytraces the map, so you could most likely get pretty good lighting for static scenes like a building.
Re:How about "new" engines? (Score:1)
Perhaps the best would be a combination of both a real-time game-engine model of the building, and a pre-rendered scripted video focusing on those details you're trying to sell on.
try blender (Score:4, Informative)
http://blender.nl
Classic (Score:5, Interesting)
We did it with Q3 (Score:1)
Checkit out here [plu.edu]
I gotta admit - pretty cool to load a map of a building on campus during those late night LAN parties....
Re:We did it with Q3 (Score:2)
[...scenes] Scenery and rendering (Score:2, Interesting)
- It's a proven project
- It's a reference to programmers
- It has wireframe technology with NURBS-like potencialities
- It can be easily modeled according to developers' intentions
- It analizes objects that won't be visible in the rendered scene and it doesn't spend time processing such objects
Some drawbacks:
- Most floating-point operations are done using single-precision format rather double-precision in order to save bandwidth and to increase performance - hey, QIII engine was designed for 3D games then graphics processing is done along other tasks (physics, sound, artificial intelligence, etc. processing)
- 3D models must keep compatibility between QIII engine (developed for games) and the 3D modeler software (developed for CAD)
Quake 1! (Score:1)
Anyways, the idea of designing a house or other building as a Quake level is appealing... Especially since it wouldn't be hard to add some weapons here and there for play as an actual Quake level. Mwhahaha.
The computer science building in Cambridge (Score:1)
Theres also a year old Slashdot article (Score:1)
Unrealty - Unreal engine for architecture (Score:2, Interesting)
Geez, I'm almost miffed that I had to plug my own project myself.
Yes, things like this have been done before, and even featured on Slashdot [slashdot.org]. That article is about NASA doing a virtual tour of the International Space Station using Unrealty [unrealty.net], which is a stripped-down version of the same Unreal engine used in Unreal Tournament, targeted at architects and real estate developers. Even won an award for a research paper [unrealty.net] I did on the concept.
While it never really caught on, perhaps the next go at, using the next-generation Unreal technologies, will. Structure Studios [structurestudios.com] is one such competitor, using next-generation engines to produce even more realistic representations. And you can check out some of the work of a licensed Unrealty locale developer at 3dx3 [3dx3.com].
Not new, but still interesting (Score:2)
A number of years ago a buddy of mine at Fermilab created a walk-through of the control rooms as a map for Duke Nukem. I don't think he included weapons, but people loved going around smashing computer monitors with the "mighty foot".
No, sorry, I don't know where you can get it...
I DOOMed my house... (Score:2)
It is very easy to use a Quake map-editor to create a map of a house of a building, but you'll hit the limits of these engines as soon as you try to polish the chromes, so to speak (lightning conditions, proper wall textures, bathrooms, etc.). As a prototype, it's great, but that's pretty much its scope.
Monty Python (Score:2)
Mr. Wiggin: This is a 12-storey block combining classical neo-Georgian features with the efficiency of modern techniques. The tenants arrive here and are carried along the corridor on a conveyor belt in extreme comfort, past murals depicting Mediterranean scenes, towards the rotating knives. The last twenty feet of the corridor are heavily soundproofed. The blood pours down these chutes and the mangled flesh slurps into these....
CAD App. (Score:1)
We have looked at using various game systems instead, but nothing so far has compared to the level of detail we get with MesaGL...
Now for non-programmers, MesaGL might be a bit of a problem.