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Using 3D Game Engines in Architecture?

Posted by Cliff on from the deathmatch-in-the-foyer dept.

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?

3 of 22 comments (clear)

  1. Classic by VA+Software · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The classic example of this is the Notre Dame cathedral project. It is done using the Unreal engine.

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  2. [...scenes] Scenery and rendering by Ninja_Gaiden_III_cut · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Like billcopc said and I'll summarize, a 3D game engine is designed to be fast and its render params produce good-quality results, but it isn't near high-quality, something I like to add into this thread there's related to the Quake III engine:

    - 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)

  3. Unrealty - Unreal engine for architecture by Vito · · 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. That article is about NASA doing a virtual tour of the International Space Station using Unrealty, 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 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 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.