walk through

[mskin]

My office wants to do a virtual walk through of a room or set of rooms. It sounds like we might do a web page or something and make it available to the client to access and expplore. Im not really sure where to start...

 

(3d max 8)

[mbr]

Well, your choices are:

 

1. Learn

2. Hire a firm

 

If #1, try a search for animations, walk throughs, etc. And read them all. You'll find many great suggestions.

 

Big questions:

- how much time do you have?

- what skills do you have (I am guessing you are not that familiar with 3D and animations?)?

- what hardware/software are you using (this directly realates to #1)?

- what does your client want/need?

- what's the scale of the project?

 

These are all crucial. Putting it on the web is the last consideration and won't be a big deal (it'll be a hit 'play and watch', not truly interactive - it'd be too laborious to make it interactive given all this).

 

Good luck.

[mskin]

Im using 3d max 8, autocad 2005... mental ray but recently vray free. im fairly competent modeler. I would like to do this myself.

 

It seems like i want to do some sort of VRML embedded into HTML. Is this the best way to give a client a good sense of space and materials?

 

I have (within past ten minutes) exported to VRML97 file, embedded into HTML and succesfully controlled the view in explorer. I found the controls used in explorer to be limiting and assume this is a function of the plug in viewer. Whats the best plug in to use?

 

How do i render materials into the scene? Render to texture?

 

I have done animations, this is not an animation... client needs to control it. scale is relatively small... classroom. Good to learn on i figure.

[Aaron2004]

If you have time...we use Quest 3D here (http://www.quest3d.com). It has a fairly high learning curve, but it's excellent for real time walkthrouhgs.

 

Also, try RTRE...now that I think about it, that might be a better program for you...I think you can get a watermarked demo off of turbosquid. It's a plugin for 3D studio that lets you export your scene to a .exe and walk around in it.

[Christopher Nichols]

If you have time...we use Quest 3D here (http://www.quest3d.com). It has a fairly high learning curve, but it's excellent for real time walkthrouhgs.

Also, try RTRE...now that I think about it, that might be a better program for you...I think you can get a watermarked demo off of turbosquid. It's a plugin for 3D studio that lets you export your scene to a .exe and walk around in it.

 

Based on the demo, Quest seems really cool and easy to use (after the initial learning curve). It is all node based which is cool. I think Quizzy here is a big user. You may want to ask him questions.

[mskin]

what about this...

 

A 360 degree photograph of a room, kind of like what the realtors have on thier websites.... how difficult could that be?

[kippu]

thats easy ....just model the entire room and use panorama inbuilt in the max

[mskin]

thats what ill do... thanks guys. I would like to create a space that could be explored however.

 

Thanks again.+

[martincg]

or turntool is not bad too, http://www.turntool.com - plug-in for max and easy to learn

[Clausbang]

Hi

If are considering placing it online I would go for TurnTool as well. That is very difficult with Quest3D. The quality of VRML is just not good enough.

[sunilarch]

try 'cult3d'(http://www.cult3d.com)

[Adamu]

I would also recommend Turntool for online interactive walkthroughs. Although Quest is a much more powerful piece of kit. If you only need a walkthrough, the less steep learning curve and speed of Turntool is one of the best at the moment for online real-time 3D content delivery.

[dbarc]

thats what ill do... thanks guys. I would like to create a space that could be explored however.

Thanks again.+

From what I've seen of 3D walkthrough solutions for web, my preference is still 360 panoramas by a long way.

 

Nothing seems to come close in terms of the quality of imagery you can achieve. For true 3D solutions you are still heavily reliant on the (unknown) performance of the viewer's computer which forces you into a 'lowest common denominator' approach - very low quality textures, stripped down geometry etc..

 

With panoramas, the quality is determined by your rendering abilities.

 

I would use one of the node-based panoramic tools where you click on hotspots within the panorama to move from room to room - http://www.vrtoolbox.com for example

[thomas+son]

I have never created TURNTOOL's version, but I have tested the walkthrough on my wife's Pentium 266 and it work fine.

 

Thomas+son

[Clausbang]

I don't think you should worry about TurnTool not looking the same on all computers, as you can see from the system requirements below.

From the TurnTool website:

TurnTool Viewer minimum requirements:

- Windows 95, 98, Me, NT4, 2000 or XP.

- DirectX 7.0 or later or OpenGL 1.1 or later.

- 32 MB system memory or more.

- Pentium 133 processor or greater.

Then it is up to you how large you make the model and consequently the speed.

It doesn't support several of the advanced features that only new graphicscard have, and therefore the model will look the same anywhere. My home puter is a athlon 600mhz with a tnt2 32mb graphics card -and it runs fine.