Wolf Posted March 8, 2007 Share Posted March 8, 2007 Being an old Lightscape fan, i missed the realtime viewing of Architectural models, so i have been working on an engine that takes baked Gi models made in max and lets you fly around in realtime. I used Vray which took a few hours to render the lightmaps, getting some nice results, around 60 fps on a geforce 6 with 8x aa and 8x filtering. screenshots below, will post a demo soon. Model is of a synagogue that Louis Kahn never got around to building Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nic H Posted March 8, 2007 Share Posted March 8, 2007 sounds great, i have always been interested in realtime stuff but iv allways felt the effort outweighed the benefit. Id be very interested in seeing some more info! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wolf Posted March 8, 2007 Author Share Posted March 8, 2007 Ease of use was my main interest, having played with a few realtime tools and game engines, i didnt want it to be complicated to get the model into the engine, or to have to learn an editor. The process is to bake the lightmaps, name your objects based on how you want them to be shown in the engine, and then export to the viewer. I have also included a special naming convention for Level of Detail to make larger scenes. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nic H Posted March 8, 2007 Share Posted March 8, 2007 I think you are right there. Quest 3D,Turntool etc all seem very involved for what is basically navigating around a static well finished model. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DavidR Posted March 8, 2007 Share Posted March 8, 2007 watching thread (why isn't there an option for this?) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wolf Posted March 9, 2007 Author Share Posted March 9, 2007 heres a scene im working on. Texture crawl is notorious in rt engines, especially with high res maps, theres a 2k map on this model so i tried using lower level of detail maps for further away objects, it worked quite well, and would be the optimal way to do this, but in the end i found that using the graphics cards anisotropic filtering looks pretty good at a slight cost to fps. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jeff Mottle Posted March 9, 2007 Share Posted March 9, 2007 watching thread (why isn't there an option for this?) There is. Click "Thread Tools -> Subscribe to Thread" at the top of this thread. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
angroni Posted March 10, 2007 Share Posted March 10, 2007 I'm currently using EON Studio in my school. Its just import in the model and voila.... ^^ any comment about EON? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
only3d Posted March 10, 2007 Share Posted March 10, 2007 looks real nice! im on the look-out for a nice & easy VR engine so i'll b looking forward to this. and dear old kahn is one of my favourites too! good work Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
oluv Posted March 12, 2007 Share Posted March 12, 2007 both examples look very nice, free of any baking-artifacts. may i ask if you rendered complete-maps or only lightmaps with multitextured seperate diffuse maps? what gi-method did you use for baking in vray and what are your settings? i am always getting artifacts, especially if surfaces are overlapping. i cannot find the right settings when baking with vray. i attached you an example, where i tried to bake the same scene with vray and with radiosity. radiosity shows less artifacts and better subtle details in shadow/light areas. another problem i am always having is inside/outside lighting. either it is too dark inside or too bright outside. so most of the time i must divide my model into a separate inside-area, and an outside area and bake both maps with different exposures. with big models this is quite exhausting. i would hope for a better and simpler method. would like to know how you deal with this. best regards, olaf ps. the final baked model can be found in this posting btw: http://www.cgarchitect.com/vb/20816-acrobat-3d-test.html Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wolf Posted March 12, 2007 Author Share Posted March 12, 2007 both examples look very nice, free of any baking-artifacts. may i ask if you rendered complete-maps or only lightmaps with multitextured seperate diffuse maps? It can do both, but i get better results by rendering texture and light as 2 passes, so you can use a high res tiling texture map and a lower res lightmap. what gi-method did you use for baking in vray and what are your settings? i am always getting artifacts, When i started initially bringing models in, they were from various prerendered scenes i had done, and i found that you just cant get away with dodgy modeling that max happily renders. walls have to be snapped and not intersecting or the 32 bit zbuffer creates bad jaggies. I wish there was an easy way to get what you modeled into the engine no matter how you got there modeling, but ultimately you need good low poly skills to get the best quality lightmaps i found. The best results i got is when i completely poly modeled a space with no intersecting objects. other than that crank up vrays settings ie. imap -3 -0 100 hsubd. another problem i am always having is inside/outside lighting. either it is too dark inside or too bright outside. so most of the time i must divide my model into a separate inside-area, and an outside area and bake both maps with different exposures. with big models this is quite exhausting. i would hope for a better and simpler method. would like to know how you deal with this. i guess the ideal situation is to mimic the human eye, i was considering hdri but it eats an awful lot of memory. right now i bake the lightmaps and adjust the brighness contrast levels etc in PS. this lets me try different light levels without rerendering. Another thing that may work is by using level of detail to turn lights on and off or change lightlevels. Btw. I am looking for a few testers to make sure the viewer works ok. email me if your interested support@lightcraftresearch.com Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Clausbang Posted March 15, 2007 Share Posted March 15, 2007 Hi Wolf It really looks nice. A suggestion for you is to look at what the specific user benefit of your tool is. LOD is nice if it enables you to create larger scenes (better quality), but try make something automatic. I think you need to consider the points that sets you apart, as there are a ton of real-time tools right now. /Claus Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
oluv Posted March 15, 2007 Share Posted March 15, 2007 although there are tons of realtime engines, there is not a single one, that really can produce results with a single click. quest's new max-exporter doesn't really work as it should, you still have to export your model as directx-file. turntool has some limitations too... what is still missing is an engine that can produce results directly out of max, without much fiddling. you have a max-model *click* then you have a walk-through model. let's see wolf is able to give us something like this. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wolf Posted March 16, 2007 Author Share Posted March 16, 2007 a few test that i have done lately, getting some very high res textures into the engine, here is a 8192x8192 landscape. Also a house im working on, the lightmaps were rendered quite low for testing purposes, texturing is next up. Oluv... as you can see i am getting artifacts when i do a low res bake (-5 -3 imap) only way to get that looking clean is to crank it right up and let it render for a few hours. maybe it will be the same for the engine you use? My main target group for this engine will be Architects and visualizers, who will want to see what the lighting is doing in their project and study it in realtime. I do not expect to make photorealistic scenes that rival prerendered with it, but as a nice flyaround tool that a client can easily take control of and get a feel for their building. The control is super smooth with easing in movement and camera look, its quite cinematic compared to the sharp control of fps games. Clausbang... Im not sure of the current crop of real time tools out there, the screens i have seen look quite game like. im not sure if it is easy to implement texture baking easily, for this engine all you have to do is make sure the object your baking has the word LightMap in its name. thats it. once you have imported it into the engine, it converts everything. to texture maps and lightmaps. It can handle textures up to 8192 pixels for landscapes and aerial photography, has an option for flat reflections such as pool water. Level of detail because you are loading the scene into your video cards RAM, providing it fits you will get 75fps easily, if it doesnt it has to swap textures from memory reducing your frame rate down to about 30 with LOD in theory so long as you only have high res textures close up, there is only the limit of your main memory for scenes. 32 bit alpha channels for plants etc. Instance rendering, Proxy support, animated textures and lightmaps. and stereo polarised projection. more detailed news of some of these things soon, as i have a dayjob unfortunately. so only have the wee hours of the night to work. cheers for the interest Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wolf Posted March 28, 2007 Author Share Posted March 28, 2007 I have now got a demo up if you would like to give it a try you can download it here. http://www.lightcraftresearch.com Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
anvaraziz Posted March 28, 2007 Share Posted March 28, 2007 thanks for the demo,, Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
thomas+son Posted March 30, 2007 Share Posted March 30, 2007 This VERY promising, we just need a simple tool like your website describes. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ChooChoo Posted April 2, 2007 Share Posted April 2, 2007 I got into gaming and made myself a kick butt comp to play on. When I jumped in to the VR world of the game I was like "whoooaaa" Same idea I had is what you followed through on. I was looking into HL2 engine and it was a PITA to make it plain and clear. This is quite an accomplishment. Very nice indeed. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wolf Posted April 10, 2007 Author Share Posted April 10, 2007 In the little time that i have had the website up, i have had enough sales to let me quit my dayjob and work on V2 fulltime. A big thankyou to every one who has bought Halcyon, and i am looking forward to seeing the projects you are creating with it. I promised myself that when i had enough to cover me for a few months of work, i would reduce the price of Halcyon. Therefore i am now offering Halcyon for only $150 I will start a users gallery soon, so if you would like me to put your projects up please send me an email with some images. thankyou again for your support Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gco808 Posted June 6, 2007 Share Posted June 6, 2007 Quite IMpressive! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Casey Hawley Posted January 2, 2008 Share Posted January 2, 2008 I was recently introduced to Halcyon via the demo. Very cool! I work for an ArchVis shop and we are looking for something just like this. How detailed are the instructions for using Halcyon? We use Max9 and VRay. My tests with texture baking could not achieve results similar to what I was seeing in the synagogue demo lightmaps. The Max Help isn't really detailed about all the texture baking settings. My biggest concern is how difficult is it to use? Is strong scripting experience necessary? Thanks! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Patrick Mc Ginty Posted January 7, 2008 Share Posted January 7, 2008 We are downloading the demo to have a look. Are there any more updates in this area from other users. We use max and are looking for good user friendly Realtime Architectural exploration engine. Are there other engines / players worth looking at in this area? Any help would be great. thanks in advance Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Patrick Mc Ginty Posted January 7, 2008 Share Posted January 7, 2008 Hi, It chugs along on our internet machine which is v slow. We tried to run it on our quad cores but we get a directx error? winxp pro 64bit with directx 9c graphic cards 256mb any ideas? thanks, P Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Elmarq Posted February 27, 2008 Share Posted February 27, 2008 does anyone know if this project is still live? im getting an error message when trying to visit the url. thanks. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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