Sketchup to interactive real time scenes

[phillip@esperient]

Hi everyone,

 

You might have seen the news article in CGarchitect's news posts on converting Sketch up models to real time interactive scenes in 10 minutes with Esperient Creator.

 

If you haven't there is a short video of the workflow to show what is possible in terms of dragging materials, adding real time shadows and animations.

 

If anyone has any questions about working with Sketchup and Creator, I'd be more than happy to answer them here in this thread.

 

cheers,

 

Phillip

[upshot]

Very interesting! So is the deliverable limited to windows .exe? Are there other deliverable options?

 

With the 'living room' example on the website it references Vray... Could you explain this a little more?

[phillip@esperient]

hi Jay,

 

In the living room demo - the original model was 3DS Max scene, which we used to test reuse of 3DS Max assets in a real time configurator app. The model was set up for a still render with VRay in 3DS Max. We baked the VRAY lighting to textures and imported to Creator. Once in Creator, the UI and interactivity was added to form the basis of a configurator.

 

Creator supports multistage textures whch enable mixing of lightmaps and diffuse amongst other stages. So the drag and drop color change for the walls is dynamically changing a diffuse color value. The material swap - such as the materials on the couches etc is simply dynamically swapping the applied material in real time.

 

Currently our viewer is windows based and apps can be delivered as .exe or as a .esp file (esperient's application format). An esp file can be played with the standalone esperient viewer or with the esperient active-x for web pages in internet explorer. Creator also supports stereo output for cards that support it. We are looking at other output options going forward but this is the functionality that is in the current shipping product.

 

Hope that helps.

 

cheers,

 

Phillip