Quake As An Architectural Design Tool

Snaller writes: "'Established architectural virtual reality modelling systems tended to be very expensive, Mr Richens said. "We get slightly better results using a £30 game running on a £150 graphics card. So it's extremely low-cost virtual reality.'
The man saying this is Paul Richens, director of the Cambridge University's Martin Centre for Architectural and Urban Studies, and he's talking about a project to use Quake 2 as means to visualize new buildings. It's difficult for people to read architectural plans, but if you can "run" around in a virtual building you get a much better idea of what it looks like. The project is quite serious and is intended to let architects' clients see what the end product would look like - of course the guns and monsters just had to go, lest clients start to get trigger happy and blast away. 'They were doing that originally but we had to take the guns out -- the head of the department didn't like that at all,' Mr Richens said." It's a fascinating project -- reminds me of my longtime hope to see driving games used to simulate actual upcoming trips, to learn what exits will be like, etc.

Comments

Unrealty (slightly o/t (but not really))

[AxB_teeth]

hasn't unrealty been doing the same thing with the Unreal engine for quite some time? -m-

Information must be left out

[Fervent]

A Quake 2 solution for a blueprint would leave a lot of information out. Granted, in a "professional" simulator the model you show to the consumer ignores much of the structural information (they get the "pretty tour"). But you can always turn a few widgets on and say "here's the crossbeam below the thirtieth floor" or even "here's where that series of nails should be".

Inclusion of this in a Quake 2 model would slow the system down and ultimately not be as detailed. In addition, you wouldn't be able to click on a wall section and find the exact parts needed, order replacements online, etc. like you can with more professional suites (without massive modifications to the code base).

I can see it now...

[eap]

The surprised look on your client's face when he/she enters his new home.

"Hmm. I don't remember asking for an ammo dump in the kitchen, and why is my bathtub filled with toxic slime?!"

"Oh shit," you think as the Strogg guards begin to move in.

Fragging for fun and profit :)

[MousePotato]

One of the architectural firms I worked had a lot of fun with this. We would make a model of the space plan of a given building in Qoole and setup lan games on saturdays or after hours when q2 came out. Part of the fun would be namimg the players as the clients who the project was being built for. You could frag the boss and the project managers for the realtor etc. Much deathmatch fun was had this way though we never did anything serious about it as far as a visualization tool. There was something funny about the whole unit scale in q2 though. The units don't convert right like 1,1,1 didn't equal 1'x1'x1' I think it worked out to something like 1.1x1.1x.83 I don't remember as it was a few years ago already (surely someone elso out there can post the right units). We didn't fancy up the textures or make the levels 100% accurate. We were just in it for the frags on a lan where DM would be with 4-6 players on nice highend CAD systems (21" monitors, 32meg GL cards, tons of memory etc..)The article didn't mention the incredible team building effect this has on the design teams though. In an office the little bit of competition added to the tons of fun made for a much tighter construction documentation team. This comes in quite handy when you have condoc's of 100 or so sheets and a need to assemble them quickly.

A couple highways are that bad

[roystgnr]

Are American highways really that bad, that you feel you need to practise the drive between San Francisco and L.A.?

My most exciting driving experience had to be getting off 287 in San Francisco. Normally, when you take a highway exit, and you see the sign saying "Exit 35 m.p.h.", that should be mentally translated to "Keep it below 60, and start decelerating". There's an exit in San Francisco, however, where "Exit 25 m.p.h." means "If you are driving 26 m.p.h., you are about to die". Tight little loop that nearly threw my friend's car off the road, and nearly made me rear-end him trying to brake as fast as he had to.

Yeah, yeah, my fault. I'm normally a safe driver, though, I swear...

I did this once

[cvd6262]

For my World Civ. general education requirement, I took a manufacturing class called "History of Creativity". The final project could be anything of our choosing, but it had to be about something historical and carried out creatively.

People in past semesters had done 3-D renderings of the Parthenon, etc, but they had only generated still images. I figured I could use WorldCraft 2.0 which came with Half-Life to generate something historical that the user could walk around.

I started with the Globe theater. I dug up some sketches of the new and old buildings, and then set to work. About the time I was ready to start my first real attempt, we covered the Berlin Wall in class.

So, I quickly changed the focus from just walking through a historical monument, to trying to escape from East Berlin. Again, I did pleanty of research and put serveral historically accurate escape routes into the level. Added soldiers, automatic-firing machine guns, etc.

I wrote Valve and Sierra Software to asked them if they could help with the licensing issues, but I never heard back from them. So, with the help of a couple of cracks from www.megagames.com, I was able to put the whole 70MB game (after I removed all the uneccessary sounds and models from the .PAK file), and a webpage I made on the history of the Berlin Wall, on one CD, which I "lent" to my professor for grading. He loved it, gave me a 99 out of 100 on the project, and then returned the CD.

Now the ComSci and Engineering dept. are trying to create a way to use quicktime VR to simutate a walk around campus for new/prospective students. I'm trying to convince them to use something like this instead, and this article should help.

Sad git!

[DrWiggy]

... reminds me of my longtime hope to see driving games used to simulate actual upcoming trips, to learn what exits will be like, etc.

Is it just me, or does that notion strike anybody else as being pathetic in the extreme. Are American highways really that bad, that you feel you need to practise the drive between San Francisco and L.A.? If you're about to undertake an 8-hour drive, do you really feel the need to practise it before-hand? Are you that bad a driver? Or perhaps, you want to drive down to the circle-K to pick up some more cheap booze, but you've had a few already, so had best just practise and see if you're likely to kill anybody. :-)

I can understand the prinicple though - engineers being able to "drive" down roads before building them to see if there are any danger spots, etc. and I have to admit that certain F1 racing games on the PSX are so realistic, that now when I watch F1, I know the tracks perfectly, and the on-board cameras just remind me of playing the game.

The idea of producing buildings like this though is... interesting. The problem is, that real-time rendering is not good enough yet to make this sort of tool life-like or photo-realistic. When it is, I'm sure that not only will architects spend their entire team building models like this and then converting them back to traditional architectural blueprints (rather than the principle of taking blueprints and producing models as the article suggests), but also that "violent" video games may actually cause real trauma. Now, there's a thought.

Notre-Dame cathedral modeled with Unreal engine

[Lumpish Scholar]

Planetunreal has this story about the work by Digitalo Design on VRND: the real-time virtual reality reconstruction of the Notre-Dame de Paris Cathedral. (There's also this article in Newsday Online.) Digitalo has modeled other stuff with the Unreal engine, including twelve acres of the Everglades.

Slashdot user "Vito" mentioned this in a comment on a July story, and appears to be working on a virtual reality office building tour package called "Unrealty" (being used but no yet being distributed).

P.S.: UT starts shipping for the Playstation 2 this week (before the PS2 itself ships), according to this story.

Re:Pipe dream

[Trevor Goodchild]

The whole idea of consumer 3D home design programs is dumb. As a matter of fact, the whole idea of 3D architectural design is 99% useless, and I do speak from experience. I have tried many 3D design packages for architecture, and they all suck. The only thing they are good for is generating a "Gee Whiz" from the client.

There are currently 3 different sorts of 3D packages out there. The first would be consumer products such as Broderbund's, which as you correctly mention is basically worthless. People spend hours generating these sickly looking, pastel colored models and then hand un-scaled and impossible to build floor plans to a builder. Then the builder says, "That's nice, but I need real plans, and it's going to cost you 2-5 grand for 'em."

The second ones are "complete" design packages like ArchiCAD and AutoCAD Architectural Desktop. They typically sell for something north of 5 thousand for a single seat license. These tools are absolutely unparalleled when it comes to spending far too long on something that seems to be working great until you try to generate either real working drawings or nice renderings. Then you discover that the package doesn't do either one very well, and you spend even more time fixing everything, often in another program.

The final visiualisation tools are "pure" 3d programs like Alias, 3D Studio Max, etc. These are wonderful for creating stunning looking pictures that can't be built for anything even close to a realistic budget. They also do not generate any sort of functional working drawings, so you still have to go to another program for drafting.

What DOES work for architectural CAD? 2D vector drawing tools combined with real, hands-on knowledge of actual construction practices and the ability to hand-sketch 1 & 2 point perspectives for the client. Everybody has been blathering about digital architecture for about 5 years now, making ridiculous claims about what it allows designers to do, and it is all a bunch of bullshit. Again, 2D CAD, hand drawing, real knowledge. These are what you need, and these are the only practical tools that actually work.

The siren call of 3D toys is strong, and no doubt eventually they will be able to do what people dream they should, but the current reality is not even close. My advice to anybody looking for some sort of miracle, Swiss Army CAD program is to instead spend the money on manual drafting tools and learn how to visualise in 3 dimensions. If you don't you are just wasting your time, because I absolutely guarantee any decent architect can create real plans and renderings that the client understands in far less time than some 3D jockey with an SGI.

"Be carefull in there"

[tooth]

Mr Richens revealed that the lifts were a bit dangerous because "if you get in while it's upstairs, it comes down and hits you on the head, and you die."

I hope that they get these bugs sorted out before they finish the meatspace version!

Pipe dream

[Brian Kendig]

I've often wished that the home modelling programs out there would use the Quake engine (or some other good 3D shooter engine).

I'm having a house built right now... and the best consumer-level home designer program I've found has been Broderbund's "3D Home DesignSuite." It does offer 3-D peeks into the house plan... but it doesn't do texture-mapping, nor lighting, nor does it let you roam around the model in real-time, nor does it let you angle your view up or down. All it does is crude polygonal views.

Couple the modeller in "3D Home DesignSuite" with the renderer in Quake III, and you'd have a dream come true! Broderbund, are you listening?