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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?
Using game technology for professional applications is a great idea, but not a new one. For example...
To try my hand at making maps, I built an Action Quake map of my condo/townhouse building. Only problem is whenever I enter the living room now I duck for cover behind the sofa.
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.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
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
"The Most Fun Possible on 4 wheels" is at SunBuggy in Las Vegas
The classic example of this is the Notre Dame cathedral project. It is done using the Unreal engine.
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I suggested it at the Firm for which I work.
The fat CAD kid couldn't figure out the Quake III Editing tools, and I'm not an architect. We were going to do a mock-up in Q3 and have a virtual walk through with a GeForce2Go laptop, or my ATI 128 laptop.
Needless to say, he ended up making them shell out a few grand to buy Viz.....I'm sure it's more useful though.
Posted by Cliff on Tuesday November 13, @05:50PM
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
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Are There Risks in Sharing Firewall Logs? Posted by Cliff on Tuesday November 13, @02:33PMfrom the looking-before-leaping dept.
FireballDWF asks: "What are the risks in sharing my personal Firewall logs with others? I ask as helping to put a stop to detect and stop attacks at their source by becoming an agent for MyNetWatchman sounds easy and appealing, but I am concerned about the possible risks." The MyNetWatchman service is designed to take a pro-active approach to network security. A network agent sits on a users firewall and forwards log entries to a central server that analyzes the data and warns the user if suspicious activity occurs. Sounds like a good plan, but what dangers (if any) will the users of this service be exposing themselves to by providing such access to their machines, even if they are just log files?
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Rolling Your Own Laptop? Posted by Cliff on Tuesday November 13, @10:37AMfrom the when-off-the-shelf-isn't-good-enough dept.
rneches asks: "I've been looking around for a Linux friendly laptop, and I've found a couple of reasonable systems. However, there really aren't any laptops out there that really meet the needs of a Linux user. In particular, most laptops are, more or less, desktop replacements. As such, they are loaded with scads of nifty features, beefy processors, and so forth. This is great, I suppose, if you are running Windows or MacOS and want a desktop replacement. If you're a Linux user, and spend most of your time in emacs windows (er, frames), most of that fancy stuff is more of a liability than an asset. In other words, I'm talking about coders, admins and other Linux hackers more than I'm talking about the 'average user'." In short, rneches is looking to find a way to build his own laptop, and if the platform doesn't exist to be able to do this, he's looking for help in creating one. Interested?
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Web Ads with Sound? Posted by Cliff on Tuesday November 13, @07:30AMfrom the what-annoying-thing-will-they-think-of-next dept.
Mina asks: "Just noticed that some sites, About.com in particular, started piping sound adds in their pages - one in particular (the Harry Potter themed CocaCola subsidized reading campaign from Reading is Fundamental). This isn't something that can easily be turned off - unlike popups, they can't just be clicked on or elminated by a nifty browser plugin. I'm interested in seeing how the Slashdot community deals with the new, more annoying ads that the more desperate companies are implementing now. Do you just live with them? Are there even niftier plugins to the browsers that I'm just not aware of?" And you thought pop-ups were the worst, now you can get sudden and annoying sounds played as well. Maybe browsers will have volume sliders bundled with them in the near future. God, I hope not, but if such ads become commonplace, it may be a good idea.
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Buying Brandname Linux Desktops? Posted by Cliff on Tuesday November 13, @04:21AMfrom the penguins-preinstalled dept.
bobstaff asks: "I work for a company producing a highly technical product for export of which a Linux network is a significant part. Usually we build the Linux computers from components using some of the higher end options available (Dual 1Ghz Pentium III, SCSI disk,CD-RW,tape, 512Mb Ram, High End Video card, etc...). Occasionally we have a customer, however, who insists on having a brand name computer (eg. Compaq, HP, etc..) with support in whichever country they are from, regardless of the extra cost and decreased performance. In the past this has always caused problems, from Linux incompatible components to having to fight to get the pre-installed Windows distribution overwritten with Linux. What experiences do Slashdot readers have with buying brand name computers with international support and running Linux on them? Also can anyone recommend companies with international support producing Linux computers?"
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Websites for Homebrew Electronic Projects? Posted by Cliff on Monday November 12, @10:25PMfrom the home-automation-projects-on-steroids dept.
whiplash asks: "There are regular stories on Slashdot concerning neat homebrew projects, hardware doing things nobody expects it to. I think the homebrew niche is excellent reading and wonder if there are any sites devoted to just that? Archives of articles, HOWTO's, and related material devoted to those folks that are controlling their garage doors with old serial cards and other neat things."
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What's It Like Working For Worldcom? Posted by Cliff on Monday November 12, @04:53PMfrom the extending-the-feelers dept.
Tetch asks: "I work for a multinational IT company which seems likely to transfer its "network services" team to (MCI-)Worldcom under the terms of a business arrangement (Worldcom's gonna run our company network for us). I'm contemplating transfering from my current position to that network services team but would quite like to know more about Worldcom's corporate culture before taking the plunge (since it seems I'd become a Worldcom employee in fairly short order). Does anyone have any experience of life at Worldcom they could share?" It's always smart to try get an idea of the climate in a company before you you try and sign up.
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Does Computer Journalism Have a History? Posted by Cliff on Monday November 12, @11:29AMfrom the following-the-paper-and-bit-trail dept.
apanishev asks: "Hi to all
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Standard Set of Network Diagram Icons? Posted by Cliff on Monday November 12, @08:25AMfrom the the-RIGHT-pictures-means-1000-words dept.
Cerebus asks: "I'm taking over administrative and management functions for a network, and one of the tasks is, of course, providing accurate diagrams for the whole shebang. In playing with various tools for this (Dia, Visio, Kvivio, xfig, tgif, etc). I've noticed that each package has it's own idea about what abstract icon to use for various devices (what Visio would call "logical" icons). While there is some overlap, the meaning attached to an icon is sometimes different between applications, and what's worse is that (using the example of Visio) the same application has multiple different icons for the same type of device! Is there any kind of standard for network diagram iconography? Should there be?"
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What Would You Load onto a Business Card CD? Posted by Cliff on Monday November 12, @03:20AMfrom the taking-your-critical-utils-with-you dept.
tkrabec asks: "I have a few of the Business card sized CD-roms, and I have been toying around about what to put on them. I want to make a utility disk that has stuff I commonly use or would find helpful. These CD's will hold about 50 meg I primarily do work with Win32 but I would also like some helpful linux things. I will probably make 2 disks wo get all data/programs I want. I want to put: dos boot.img 1.4Meg for older machines, rawrite 14K to write
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Proof of the gay-linux conspiracy!
Our school is in the design process right now on a new science and technology building. The architects used the Q3 engine to model a sample for us as well as providing RealVideo versions.
Checkit out here
I gotta admit - pretty cool to load a map of a building on campus during those late night LAN parties....
pGina, http://www.xpasystems.com - Making the big boys play nice.
I agree that they fake it. But how do newer engines (Unreal2, Max Payne?) do with these kinds of things?
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.
My server
and it has been done before, no doubt by many. the big drawback is the ability to provide detail. as long as the model is relatively crude it should work fine, albeit earlier comments about lighting are spot on. just don't plan on doing anything highly specific when it comes to door and window frame shapes, guardrails, reveals, etc...
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)
Heh, a (long) while ago, I remember reading about doing the same thing, but with the Quake 1 engine. Of course, it was probably more of a novelty then than it is now, since most building planning software I know of has a 3D mode.
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.
Chris 'coldacid' Charabaruk Meldstar Entertainment
A bbc article about using Quake for the computer science building in Cambridge.
Which you can find here.
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.
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...
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
Some years ago, I used DOOM for a model of my house (although some alterations had to be done, since it's two-storey high). It worked fine, and provided for a nice game, but it looked like it was just a quick&dirty prototype. I keep trying to make time available to do it in Quake...
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.
"Trust me - I know what I'm doing."
- Sledge Hammer
This reminds me of the the Architects Sketch by John Cleese and Graham Chapman from "Monty Python's Flying Circus", 20 October 1970 (script) where these architects are showing off their design for a rather unusual building... it starts off:
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....
Wheeeee
I actually write an Architectural CAD application that uses MesaGL as its 3D rendering engine.
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.
I do everything the voices in my head tell me to...