Interactive sun study / house rotator on location

[Jon Berntsen]

Hello all. One of my clients has asked me if I could make an interactive rotater that rotates only the house, while the terrain is locked. He wants to figure out the housings best angle on the actual site when it comes to the sun position and shadows from height curves. Call it an interactive sun study. Obviously this can be done in better ways than using a movie or quicktime VR.

Do you guys know of any interactive sun-studys like this? Lock the terrain, rotate the house, realtime sun/shadows render.

It is important that the output easily can be viewed by anyone. (eg Flash or java)

Thanks in advance!

Edited October 14, 2008 by chroma

[SandmanNinja]

My first reaction is to render 36 frames of the house and you set a custom controller/attribute to the rotation of the house object. Set the timeline to 36 frames and then render them out.

 

Take them into Flash and have some sort of control/scene/stage that has the interactivity built in there. User presses the LEFT button, load previous frame. User presses the RIGHT button, load the next frame.

 

As far as Max is concerned, it's just doing a 360-degree animation.

[Jon Berntsen]

Thank you for your answer. Sounds like a solution, if not a little un-effective. Whay I may seek, is some software doing this. Hmm. I am really on thin ice myself here. What if I want a fader for the time of day, and see the sun in different aspects of the day, additionally to rotating (only) the house, on top of the terrain? Any thoughts around this?

[SandmanNinja]

I have no idea for that.

 

I don't think you can do that level of interactivity with-out Max. I mean, you could do all that with MaxScript, but then your client would have to have Max to "run" the scene.

 

I've seen some Java Apps (not javascripts, but java) that does some BASIC mucking around with lighting and stuff, but no where near the level that is inherit within Max itself.

 

If you want to harness the power of Max to do this, then you'll need multiple programs to pull it off - make the renders in max and then control which render is displayed with Flash.

 

If you want to add a 2nd 'Slider' control - 1 for angle of the house and another for the angle of the sun (i.e. the time of day), then you've just increased the number of renders by a power. So, if you did 36 renders for the initial scenario, and if you want to have 10 different times-of-day displayed (one for 6am, 7am, 8am, 9am, etc), then you'd need 36 renders for 6am, 36 renders for 7am, etc.

 

That's a lot of renders.

 

You COULD do it with a 2-dimensional array in Flash.

The first element of the array is the House_Position and the 2nd element is the Time_of_day. Have 2 slider controls and when they change, pass the value of the sliders to a function. The function will return the actual name of the specific render.jpg for that time of day AND house angle.

[mixtup]

While i've always done my best to give a client what they want, whether i agree with them or not, i'd have to draw the line at this one. It's just ridiculous. I'm struggling to comprehend that the guy designs houses for a living but he can't assume the position/angle of the sun at any given time of the day in relation to the orientation of a house?

This should be common knowledge to him. Especially when you consider that the pattern has remained the same for quite some time now.

Whatever you do, don't inform him that this animation is only good for three months of the year.

And no, my glass is neither half empty nor half full, but it's plain to see that it is twice as big as it needs to be..

[Dave Buchhofer]

True mark, but thats our line of work, we take money from people who can't spatialize things in order to make it easier for them to understand.. whether its materials, composition, or sun studys..

 

How accurate are you looking to get for the sun studys? would something as simple as the shadows in Sketchup be useful? is it for a design tool, or for a presentation tool

[mixtup]

Well i can't argue with that..

[SandmanNinja]

I think SOCIAL skills is what's need here - not TECH skills.

 

Get a laptop with Max and the scene, turn on Display Shadows in Viewport and show him the model.

 

* Display Shadows in Viewport (uses DirectX shader to show shadows)

Right-click the Camera01 viewport to display the quad menu.

Choose Viewport Lighting And Shadows > Viewport Shading > Best.

Select the Daylight object in the scene, right-click the Camera01 viewport

from the quad menu choose Viewport Lighting And Shadows > Enable Viewport Shadows Selected.

 

Then do...

 

* Time Sensitive Lighting

Do the above tip on viewing shadows in Viewport

Select Daylight System -> Motion (looks like gears) -> slowly increment the time and watch Camera viewport

 

 

Let him decide which view he wants, write it down, you both sign it, then go render it.

 

Sounds like this needs to be in the Job Discussion phase, not in the middle of the project.

 

Also sounds like your client doesn't know what he wants.

 

OR

 

Tell him you'd need to do 360 renders to get the effect he wants and give him the estimate for 360 renders.

 

OR

 

Do a normal render and unwrap the house and put the texture map onto a primitive (like a cube).

 

It'll be low-poly and quality, like a video game.

 

Do some low-poly renders

 

 

I don't mind doing some extra renders for someone, but not 360 renders just so the guy can make his mind up.

[Jon Berntsen]

Thanks for feedback people!

 

Using 3d studio for showing the model directly to the client could be a solution, but: Actually, we have distributors who handles the clients, and I dont think our distributors would buy 3ds max for this only purpose.

 

I've attached a quick sketch of what I imagine.

 

It has to be easy accessible for both distributors and clients who actually pays the fun, so I imagine that the best way to output it would have been with swf. Java could also do it.

 

I guess turning the model around is no problem. The challenge would be in realtime rendring of the sun, showing correct shadows from the sun. It doesn't has to be 100% accurate/scientific, but only approximately.

 

In addition to viewing specific projects to the client, this is also to think new, and provide new solutions for our visitors on the web.

Imagine what kind of tool this would have been on our selection of catalogue houses on the internet - presented as a "playing tool" on every house model.

 

I hope I express myself good enough so that you understand me.

And I don't hope you think I'm ridicolous for trying to develop a tool like this.

I just don't know exactly where to start. Should I hire some coding professionals for this task? As you know, the economic crisis limits the amount of money available...

 

 

Regards

Edited October 28, 2008 by chroma

[Jon Berntsen]

And if the interactive version fails, I think I'll do static 360 animations, like sandmanninja said.

Yes, this has to be in the planning phase, not in the middle of a project.

 

Regards

[kbotnen]

Hi.

 

Im am working on creating such a viewer. Or its more like an web-based viz viewer, but sunstudy is one application that I hope it might be used for.

 

What Im looking for is some kind of specs/requirements souch a program/viewer should include. If you want to feed me such input on a general basis, feel free to PM or drop me a email. I see you are based in Norway, so could have been interesting to hear your opinion and maybe we could create a "use case" for the tool.

 

-K-