Interactive dvd architectural presentations?

[rlph]

Hello there! Been lurking here for a while and now I really could use some comments and opinions from the people working in the arch viz industry, and others too of course. I'm more of a multimedia type of guy but very much intrested in this field of visualization and 3d in general.

 

I did quite a lot of searching here at cgarchitect forums and did not found much material on DVD based architectural presentations. Are they used widely these day? And how about the interactive ones where you have some control over the animations and which sections/room/etc is presented? Or is it too much work to make such a DVD presentation that the cost doesn't simple justify producing one?

 

Pros and cons, besides the obvious one (dvd image quality, costs)?

 

Also if you happen to know any firm that produce such DVD I'd highly appreciate links and names. So far this is the only one with some info I have found:

 

http://www.archiform3d.com/tip-DVD-sales-suite-installations.htm

 

Cheers!

 

antti

 

//edit. oh yeah, hello to STRAT from another maxforums.org user!

[lambros]

we use dvds for presentations, but our animations tend to be small, around 1-2 min. In one case, we did create a dvd with menu and chapters, where each chapter presented a different animation, that's quite easy to do.

[bjornkn]

I have twice supplied my architect clients with an interactive model which they've used for presenting to their clients again, and accroding to my clients it was a great success.

What I did was a very simple solution, not photo-real, but with interactive realtime sun shadows. As the model was made in SketchUp I just made a lot of pages, which saves the camera and lots of other settings, like sun position, render mode, visibility of layers etc. Then my client used the freely available SketchUp Viewer and could run a tour which smoothly moves between the different pages. If theiir clients wanted to have a look around somewhere they could just stop the tour, look around, move the camera, change date/time to see how shadows would fall etc, and then just continue the tour from there.

The great thing is that it doesn't requre a lot of extra work or expenses, because it's basically just a matter of setting a few pages when you already have the model.