Virtual exterior & interior?

[bjornkn]

I may get a job soon making a virtual presentation of a school. It's situated in a very nice area with a nice view over the sea, and the topo is far from flat..

And then they want to be able to walk around inside the buildings, add sound, in-scene video, doors that open and close etc.

Would it all be possible to make this as one big virtual scene?

I've been thinking of using WireFusion, but if there are any good alternatives I'm open for suggestions. Preferably not requiring a plugin.

There are so many ways to do this that I'm really confused. I have made a lot of online exhibitions, but they have all been sets of panoramas.

Now I want to go a step further. Maybe a combination of panos and walk-arounds? The plan is to model everything as lo-poly as possible in SketchUp (max 10-15k?), and then use LightWave with Microwave to make ready-lit textures for it. I can't really see how I could possibly model a good-looking exterior scene where you can see the 3D landscape and exterior of the buildings with any level of detail though? Maybe a pano to see the views, linked to a clickable exterior VR-object with greatly simplified topo, which again links to the interior through various entrances?

I would love to see examples of similar projects, tutorials, tips or any other links that could help

[oluv]

i mostly use vrml for this kind of stuff. i use blaxxun as player, because it is "free" and it is not further developed anymore. now there is bitmanagement, which costs if you want to use it commercially, but it is only a vrml-"viewer", so i never understood what the deal was.

 

otherwise you could use some 3d-engine. quest3d is not bad and has a graphical user interface, but it is not cheap either. i have also seen some interesting examples made with turntool, which is maybe even more expensive, but is nicely intergrated into max:

http://www.jamjam.at/html/02_immo/immo_interaktiv.php

 

if you want to use prebaked realistic lighting i would avoid dynamic objects, like opening doors etc, because they will look fake, as they won't cast any shadows. i normally let either all doors open, or don't model them at all.

 

rendering interior and exterior together can be a difficult task. i normally light exterior and interior seperately.

 

if you want to use plants, either use billboards (billboards with 3 different crossed planes work well), or very low-polygon plants, otherwise your poly-count will get too high.

 

regarding level-of detail: with vrml it is very easy to control LOD. you model let's say 2 different models with different polycount and put them both into one LOD-node and specify the distance for both. you could create a very reduced model of your exterior building, where you put all your geometry into textures, when viewing from far away and switch to the higher detailed model when near.

you can also switch off your interior model, when seen from far.

you have to organise your model well in order to get control over all lods.

 

here is one of my latest scenes made with vrml which includes the background as panorama only, if you switch to walk-mode. i didn't use any lods, because the model was not that big.

http://homepage.boku.ac.at/h9526506/marggraff.html

 

here is an old model of a kindergarden, but there is no exterior with this:

http://homepage.boku.ac.at/h9526506/kinder.html

 

if you have further questions let me know.

 

best regards, o.

 

ps. you will need i-explorer to let blaxxun install automatically as active-x plug-in. it doesn't work with firefox.

[DennisHolland]

I'll go with Oluv for the overall techniques like baking and model your scene highly optimized with a very low polycount (incl. low res textures). I use Wirefusion from Demicron. WF is a Java Based authoring and scripting application, very well suitable for placing your 3D presentations on the web (even baked into a single webpage just like blaxxun but no plugs required and only a small amount of Kb's).

 

Some samples of my work are on my website, you can check 'm out here. Like Oluv's page, this one doesn't work well with Firefox:

 

http://www.dennisdepriester.com/EN/VR.htm

 

Any more questions, just ask....

[Clausbang]

I agree with the optimisation using baked textures, etc., but I don't think you will get around without using some sort of plug-in. It is a huge project that you are describing. I would also make a sky-dome of the real surroundings, and collision somewhere before you hit the boundary.

My choice would be TurnTool though . You can download a version from their website for free (http://www.turntool.com). They also have some examples of exterior scenes at http://www.cubicasa.com. 95% of all their scripting features also work in firefox, and they promise that the rest is due within a month.

 

Claus

[DennisHolland]

For the surrounding area. Instead of the dome with a stitched panorama mapped on it, you could also get wild and have all buildings made out of simple geometry and mapped by using RealViz modeler. It's somewhat timeconsuming but it produces an extremely realistic piece of VR. Can be used in all professional authoring/vr productiontools, because it's base is simple imagemapping on an object. You can take a look at www.realviz.com for more of that...

 

Basically you can do anything you want with the tools on the market lately, it all depends on the time you wanna put into a project, compared to a certain budget of course..

[bjornkn]

Thanks for all the tips and examples

I really hoped I could avoid having it locked to IE, which is the result, more or less, if you need a plugin. OTOH I've had much more problems running WireFusion inside Opera than inside IE. In fact WF seems to crash Opera quite frequently, while it works better in IE. There are problems with it in IE too though And very few plugins work in Opera, unfortunately.

That turntool looks nice and fast, and the Christiansborg demo was quite impressive, although I really missed the cast shadows, which were shown in some of the other examples (baked?).

It's interesting to see that Denmark and Sweden are so strong in this market segment

I have several RealViz programs, ImageModeler, Stitcher and SceneWeaver (which I've never used yet, but it may be useful for such a project?). I also have Canoma, which may be even more useful than ImageModeler for making photo-tex-mapped lo-poly buildings, as it works fine from a single photo. I still can't understand why MetaCreations sold out everything, including Canoma (which was bought and killed by Adobe BTW), to put all their efforts and money into the VET technology, which seems to be pretty dead nowadays? And I still can't understand why the very promising VRML technology didn't become the standard it was supposed to be.. Now there are som many different formats and technologies around that it is very confusing. If you choose one of those plugin-formats it may just as well disappear next year? I think I still want to go the Java route, for maximum compatibility, and because Java is not likely to disappear in the foreseeable future? But maybe it's wrong to try to look too far ahead? The TurnTool is out of the question anyway, because it apparently requires Max or Viz, which I have no intention of buying.

[DennisHolland]

Yes, WF is under constant development and the guys in Sweden are working hard to find a solution for the Opera/IE/Firefox clash. But the real issue is Sun Java systems here with their montly (almost) updates in their platform. Once Demicron can focus on one single and continue running java platform without any security changes and improvements all the time problems can be dicovered and fixed. New java update = new trouble with the engine WF is running on. It sucks...

 

Anyway, I guess you're pretty up to date with the knowledge so it will work out pretty fine man!

 

Dennis

[bjornkn]

I don't think I'm at all up to date on what is available, and on what is considered the "future", or what is regarded the "best".

When I first heard about WireFusion this spring I did some test scenes, which wet my appetite. But at the same time it did have some problems and crashes then as well, which were apparently caused by Java and new versions all the time. At that time it did also work better in IE than in Opera though, although I suppose both use the same Java engine? I was hoping that they had sorted out the Java problems by now.

[oluv]

did you ever consider quest3d for final output?

 

i like the executable output format quite much. you can start it without plug-in, although the files can become quite large. (of course you can output for their own plug-in too by the way)

but the funny thing with plug-ins is that you must have administrator rights in order to install them. i often wanted to send friends some examples of my work, but they were not able to install it at work, because of missing administrator rights. turntool didn't work as well.

java-based systems seem to be the best way, but you are quite reduced with the size of your models. you cannot visualise anything huge that way, and besides i am not sure about the graphic-card support of java-based systems. do they work with directx or opengl or is this mainly software-rendering?

 

there is no perfect solution out yet. altough the VR and VRML market is already out for about 10 years. they haven't managed to create something really outstanding. everyone is cooking his own soup.

but if you like skripting and such, i would go for vrml or x3d using bitmanagement contact. afterall they were the ones who developed multi-texture extensions for the old blaxxun-viewer, which now got included into the x3d specification and the viewer is very powerful, supports dx9 shaders has anaglpyh-support und much more.

what i dislike about bitmanagement is their licencing. you have to pay for the player per view or per cd basis, so you can never use the player freely for your own projects. and using their SDK (which is only a text-based documentation as far as i know) comes also with an annual fee.

with quest on the other hand you have no further costs, and as far as i know even upgrades are free.

 

best regards, o.

[bjornkn]

Well, I don't know about Quest3D. It looks like it's a IE-only solution, or freestanding exe?

I agree that licensing schemes are a nuisance. A few years ago I tried to convince a client that I should make a VET version of a virtual exhibition, but it all stranded on VETs licensing scheme, and that it was a PC-only (at that time) solution. They were very much SGI-fans at that time, then Mac and finally Win. Not to easy to sell them an expensive PC-only solution then

BTW, I just finished a SketchUp-only visualization project for a new football /soccer) stadium proposal contest. I gave them the model with SketchUp Viewer so that they could walk around and look at it from all angles and in different light conditions. The architects group presented it to the jury yesterday, and they were appearently very positive. So now I have to burn CDs for the jury members so that they can play around with it themselves Looks like they/we have a good change in that contest

 

So maybe that is a solution too - a pure SU model, vieweable on a PC or Mac?

After all you should be able to apply baked textures to a SU model too, either from photos or rendered and baked inside LW with Microwave, because otherwise interiors gets very dark and flat in SU because there is only one light source - the sun. There wouldn't be any doors opening/closing, hotspots, in-scene video or sound though..

[oluv]

After all you should be able to apply baked textures to a SU model too, either from photos or rendered and baked inside LW with Microwave, because otherwise interiors gets very dark and flat in SU because there is only one light source - the sun. There wouldn't be any doors opening/closing, hotspots, in-scene video or sound though..

 

baked models are indeed possible within sketchup, although i had some problems with this. i unwrapped and baked the model in max and then tried to import the model back into sketchup through 3ds format. well it worked, but some very thin and long faces were not textured at all, sketchup applied standard materials to them, so there were "holes" in the baked model. i tried it with more simple models and it worked well, but with large and complex scenes there seems to be some uv-mapping problem probably caused during the importing procedure whithin sketchup.

maybe you should try on your own and show us your results ;-)

 

by the way it is enough to bake skylight only. this imported model lighted by sketchup's sun will create cool and realistic shadows.