Using 3D Game Engines in Architecture?

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?

Comments

Lighting and detail issues

[billcopc]

Lighting models in Half Life or Quake aren't necessarily suited to real-life conditions. You can produce a much more convincing illusion of sunlight in 3dsmax than you could ever dream of faking in those older game engines. That's the key word : fake. Light is a complicated concept, and is what makes the difference between a 5-second quick render and a 15-minute quality render. To achieve decent lighting in real-time, game engines resort to some smart approximations like pre-calculated reflection maps and light-mapping as opposed to true ray tracing.

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.

try blender

[BroadbandBradley]

it allows you to export to many formats (and import if you already have a 3dmodel) and also has a game engine.
http://blender.nl