Interactive Walkthroughs

[Brian Smith]

I'm trying to get back into interactive walkthroughs where you can use a mouse or joystick to walkthrough a project and I haven't done so for over 10 years since using VIZ 3. At that time there was a great plugin called Smoothmove that ran in VIZ which let you create VR animations and the right mouse button to move forward and the left mouse button to change your viewing direction. I'm disappointed to see that that plugin is no longer available because it worked great.

 

All I'm looking for is a program that can stitch VR images back to back and a viewer which lets you watch them in sequential animation. I've seen a lot of plugins in the last couple of years that claim to offer realistic interactive walkthroughs, but nothing that really does what Smoothmove did 10 years ago. Anybody know of a really decent program that does this. Was looking at Rtre but their samples are far from what I would quality. Anyone know if Rtre can do the job, if the scenes were high quality?

[Mario Pende]

Did you read abouth this new renderer thats coming?

http://www.fryrender.com

[manta]

How about these guys...

 

http://www.immersivemedia.com/

[Brian Smith]

Yep we use it now.

http://www.cgarchitect.com/vb/19026-must-have-technology.html

 

But it doesn't do interactive VR walkthroughs.

 

Hopefully Fry will be the answer.

[jkletzien]

Sorry Brian, I'm having a hard time following are you looking for a program that is going to stitch together images to generate panoramic VR Nodes, ie realviz stitcher (stitcher.realviz.com), or a plugin that turns MAX into a game engine (redviewer.com), or something that can combine both in a way that is completely beyond me?

 

I also used Smoothemove many moons ago, and I don't recall it doing much except generating seamless VR Nodes - which I think has basically been replaced by MAXScript efforts:

http://www.cgtechniques.com/goodies/panotour/

 

But hey, maybe I never used smoothmove properly 'cause it always had the same name as the herbal laxative tea...

 

EDIT-Just re-read your initial post, and immersive media post and now I think I understand....seems interesting especially if you were doing a stadium or something. Why isn't IMC distributing their viewer - seems like a no-brainer to me?

[Brian Smith]

Jon,

The demo shown in the link you provided does not do what Smoothmove used to do. Right now in Max or Viz you can create use the Panorama Exporter to create one single VR file. All Smoothmove did is create a VR image at each point along a camera path and splice the VRs from each frame together to make one VR file that you could playback and move through. The program you show is not the same...you have to click a 'hotspot' to move to a new area. Smoothmove let you use the right mouse button to forward along the prerendered camera path. It's the same thing as rendering a movie except Smoothmove let you render all 6 views and spliced them together. Smoothmove did let you create hotspots and move to them but it's far better in my opinion to be able to move freely.

 

I can't believe in today day and age that someone wouldn't have developed the program that would allow for this.

[Clausbang]

Hi Brian

 

Do you expect rendered quality in your interactive model?

As I hear it you are looking for a solution with a photerealistic look. That is not posible unless you have a very hardcore games programmer and a high-end computer.

 

My suggestion would be to use something like the TurnTool plugin (http://www.turntool.com) or maybe RTRE. My experience is with TurnTool and here you just select the objects that you want to be collidable, place a sphere make it physical and link a camera to it. Then click export and view.

 

The other possibility is the spherical maps and something like panoviewer, but it isn't really a walkthrough ;-)

 

/Claus

[Chad Warner]

Smoothmove wasn't realtime, and it wasn't 100% interactive. What it did do was rendery 360 panoramas at every frame along a predetermined path, so at anytime you wanted to look around along that path you could. The good thing about it was that the entire "walkthrough" was as high quality/photoreal as you wanted it to be.

[Brian Smith]

Hi Brian

Do you expect rendered quality in your interactive model?

As I hear it you are looking for a solution with a photerealistic look. That is not posible unless you have a very hardcore games programmer and a high-end computer.

/Claus

 

Claus,

As Chad says it was completely photorealistic or as photorealistic as the Max user made the scene.

 

Smoothmove wasn't realtime, and it wasn't 100% interactive.

Chad,

I considered it very much realtime. I'm not sure why you think otherwise. And yes you were confined to a path but that path could be made to go anywhere and the user had the ability to "smoothmove" anywhere along that path. It was a fantastic program and I am amazed there's nothing like it out there now...not that I know of anyway. If I knew how to program I'd make it myself.

[Chad Warner]

I meant realtime as in being able to generate the rendering on the fly like RTRE or turntool does.

 

And I'm with you on this one, it was a great program, and I really don't understand what happened to it.

[Dan J]

Hey all,

I used Smoothmove several years ago. Very good tool, though not realtime in the true sense. Multi-nodal pre-rendered views along a set camera path with out the ability to stray off that path. QuickTime has a few ways to come close to this effect, but not exactly the same. All the other tools mentioned above can do the same, but the max script is probably the best approach.

The company is based here in Portland, Oregon was under the name Infinite Pictures, now Imove http://www.imoveinc.com/. The Smoothmove product went away almost at soon as it was released with Max 3. The company stopped development of the plugin and focused on their spherical video product as they felt this was the golden egg for them and is still keeping them in business.

Sorry for the current history lecture.

Good luck.