Frank Lloyd Wright in Half Life 2

[Christopher Nichols]

I looked aroudn, and I did not find any posts on this here. I may be wrong, but I thought I would share in case I am the first to show this:

 

[notamondayfan]

yea i saw this a week or so. bloody good use of a decent games engine. have been playing around with the source engine a bit. cheep too, although i dont know if theres any aditional costs for using the software for commercial purposes.

 

imagine creating your latest building in this software.......then adding aliens, exploding barrels and scientists and then going on a killing spree!!!!

[ecastillor]

Somehow, I kept waiting for zombies and aliens to appear, also missed the rusty crobar....

 

Joking aside....it looks awesome....must've taken a lot of work....

[Brian Cassil]

I can't remember where I saw this, might have been on CGSociety. I think it's cool and all but is there a way to make the lighting less creepy?

[Ricardo Eloy]

I downloaded the map, but it doesn't work... Cool stuff, though.

[diegofer_9]

totally agree about waiting for zombies to show! other than that, it's nice.

[FlytE]

I can only imagine that people havent used this kind of media for archviz because of licensing issues. Frankly im amazed though. The possibilites for using this kind of virtual environment are endless, both for presentation and design. Thanks for the link chris, its going round my office hehe.

[Hazdaz]

I think that was fantastic. The only "hokey" part was the flames in the fireplace and the glass doors, but really everything else was VERY nice.

 

When I see these videos I am saddened that we have to resort to using a GAMING engine to do such realtime visualization, yet $XXXX programs (in the form of MAX, MAYA, etc) don't offer those capabilities built in.

 

Tisk, tisk to AutoDesk, Softimage and the rest of the Digital Content Creation developers.

[IC]

Just because it's for games doesn't mean it's sub-standard stuff.

 

The technology behind these engines goes beyond what off the shelf 3d software can do. These engines cost an absolute fortune to develop and commercial licenses are prohibitive too (or they used to be anyway-not sure nowadays).

[Ricardo Eloy]

Well, I know some guys who make this kind of thing... They use a tool that comes with the game (level editor). It's quite powerful and not really expensive.

[IC]

I've played around with the Unreal and Half Life level editors but I think you have to buy a license if you want to use the actual engine for commercial purposes.

As far as I know (purely from reading 3D World!) most games run on a handful of industry standard engines that are sold/leased on a license format.

 

I haven't been interested in this stuff for a long time so I could be seriously out of date.

[FlytE]

Yeah but it costs a hell of a lot of money for one of those licences... i might look into it and find out how much hehe. One interesting thing is that along with the hammer world editor, softimage XSI released the xsi mod tool specifically for half-life 2 for free. Yes its cut down, but in a similar sort of way to what viz is to max.... very interesting if for nothing else other than to mess around with xsi hehe

[Hazdaz]

Just because it's for games doesn't mean it's sub-standard stuff.

 

I never said it was "sub-standard stuff" at all - hell, games have been pushing the technological barrier for decades now.

 

My point is that I get frustrated in that a program like MAX or MAYA that cost many thousands of dollars which is actually made to create 3D models and it's main purpose is to create visualizations doesn't let you create those kind of walk-throughs, so instead you have to settle on using a gaming engine. Seems very backwards in my mind. Just like how you can export out a DXF of a scene, I see no good reason that you can't export out a walk-through like that from MAX or XSI or similiar program.

[kuneho]

The software will end up being more expensive. More resources are needed. More skilled workers needed. Etc. A good alternative is to make a sort of game engine, vrml stuff for designers who don't need to learn all the coding. Then have those people with money to buy the software, plug it in their 3D pacakge, and good to go!

[FlytE]

Well there is always the torque engine which is free for download. There is also blender.... I think source is still most powerful. I emailed valve asking for some information regarding licensing etc, but ive had no response from them. Given their reputation for slow responses (if you even get one) I dont know if I will be hearing from them anytime soon lol

[Zeilveen]

This is cool stuff, I remebere I made a small village in Quake2 editor and it looked ok, but this looks far better. Still feel too tall and the house is too scary in a way. I wonder how Directx 10 will enhance quality and make it photorealistic..

[architecturegeek]

Yeah but it costs a hell of a lot of money for one of those licences...

 

Well...maybe if you consider 20-40 dollars a hell of alot of money. The source SDK is included with half-life 2 which you should be able to pick up pretty cheap now...... Depending on what you do commercially the royalties can vary. If you're making walkthroughs of a project your fine.

 

This still precludes a simple import as source and other engines like it use proprietary objects, which means just importing your max/maya/etc. model doesn't necessarily yield the same results as building the model from scratch in the level editor.

[IC]

....and it will look half as good as even your basic scanline rendered version.

[FlytE]

yeah thats how much it costs to buy halflife 2 but to my understanding, obtaining a commercial license to use it as you please costs alot more....

 

Iain, ive also seen some hl2 stuff that has amazing atmosphere and looks very realistic... No disrespect to the author but I dont think that falling water level is the most realistic ive ever seen... but thats not to say it couldnt be done much better.