alaburb Posted August 20, 2004 Share Posted August 20, 2004 Hard to know where to put this, so here it goes.... Work in the office has been slow lately, so yesterday I broke down, walked out and bought Doom3 (£29.00!). After 45 minutes of play I was bored again - sorry, the game kinda sucks. But to be honest, that's not why I bought it. I got into mapping (game speak for 3d modeling) when I designed a pub in Quake III Arena. It was a splendid success. So much so, I have never understood since why someone (i mean company) didn't simply take one of the existing game engines (real time renderers, basically), package it together with a 3dmax-like package (Discreet's GMAX for archies), and sit back and watch the whole face of architecture change (oh, and probably make a butt load of money in the process). Now, there have always been problems with mapping which has prevented it from catching on widely... 1.) has always been the steep learning curve to getting started 2.) requires addit'l warez and skillz - like the quirky Radiant editor from Id Software 3.) low poly thresholds. 4.) odd folder structure (whats a pk3 file?) 5.) and most of all the repulsive geekiness factor 6.)equally repugnant violence that such games are typically drenched in. So where was I.... oh yes... in the course of a few hours I was exporting torii from 3d Max and walking around in them. Texture mapped and all! I was amazed by how high density the meshes it could handle are. So I am here to tell you that it is a lot easier than you think...it comes with its own modeling software built-in. To help you get over your inhibitions I will post the following two links crammed with video tutorials.... take a look: doom 3 world Planet Doom - particularly 3ds Max tutorial - it rocks. I'd like to create a community of Architectural Mappers who are interested in developing Doom 3 as a purely architectural tool. Since Doom3 just came out a few days ago (in UK) I guess you could say this is at the forefront. But don't just take my word for it... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Richard McCarthy Posted August 20, 2004 Share Posted August 20, 2004 This thread should go under the "Realtime/VR/ Interactive/ VRML Forum", not under the general discussion forum. ... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Richard McCarthy Posted August 20, 2004 Share Posted August 20, 2004 As for the actual discussion, yes, I have been interested in realtime 3D engine for a long time, I too have bought Doom3 out of boredome (LOL) but more interested in the engine. That doom3world site is great for learning, but I feel DOOM3 is still not quite the engine for architecture. It's slow for one (that's why John carmark use a lot of tricks to make it not look so apparent) And quite limited I would say for presentation. The shadow will be it's main problem (too dark and as stated in one of his QuakeCon 2004 video discussion, there are problems with shadow when it's shone under bright light... seams appear) There are other hosts of problem which could make it a problematic renderer unless you want to present your architecture are something REALLY dark.... Also, I havn't seen a pool of water in DOOM3 yet...... I wonder how you going to make realistic water hehe... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
alaburb Posted August 20, 2004 Author Share Posted August 20, 2004 If you please, let's keep this post here for the time-being so that more people can benefit from reading it... Let's not get bogged down in knocking the game engine...for the time-being it is by far one of the most advanced. There will, no doubt, be better game engines very soon - Half-Life 2 seems poised to take the lead as far as lighting goes (whenever it comes out). Richard, you are obviously much more up on these technical issues than I am...have you tried creating your own projects in it? If so, can you post us some examples..? I will do likewise very soon. That said, Doom 3 will present an unprecedented opportunity for CG Archies to get into mapping. I urge people to give it a go. No other game will have the amount of support available. Suffice it to say that there are many games out there, but this is the best to try it out. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DelfoZ Posted August 20, 2004 Share Posted August 20, 2004 Doom3, Same gameplay as Doom 1,2 Quake 1,2,3 , just new engine and yes is bored, i finish it just to see the maps.. but the 90% of the maps r corridors... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
augustuslazarus Posted August 20, 2004 Share Posted August 20, 2004 what about the unreal tournament engine ? seems to be a pretty fast...and there are tons of tutorials and other related stuff out there. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
alaburb Posted August 20, 2004 Author Share Posted August 20, 2004 Unreal Tournament looks kind of flat. Now that I have tried building some basic rooms in Doom3, my biggest frustration - as Richard mentioned - is the total lack of ambient lighting. It really undermines all the great stuff about this engine. The bump and specular mapping capabilities are astounding ....but what good are they if they are always hidden in a darkness. Maybe Half-Life 2 will be the holy grail... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CRD Posted August 20, 2004 Share Posted August 20, 2004 I think it would be an impressive presentation tool, but I've been intimidated by it's complexity. On the surface it seems like something that would be hard to do well. Besides complexity, I have two problems. First, I think it would take longer to generate a presentation in Doom3 that just stills or an animation. Which to most people means that it's more expensive and it's hard to find the clients to pay for them. For me (and I work in a large Archi firm and most of my work is for designers), it would take too long to make rapid changes and be tough to crank out a good presentation in a tight deadline. Second, most of the people who this is presented to, don't know how to play Doom. And that means they would be intimidated by the controls. The up coming generation of people would be comfortable with this, but most of the established decision makers are not game players. If it can't be put in Powerpoint, they don't like it! Aside from all that, I do see the potential and I think it'd be great if you make some tutorials for it for the rest of us to learn from. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RyanSpaulding Posted August 20, 2004 Share Posted August 20, 2004 I think we are a few good years (5 or so) from this being possible. First off, you cannot achieve the level of realism within the Doom 3 engine. Carmack is a genius and he's good at hiding limitation within an engine. There is a large about of bad anti-a in the levels when lit, and the engine is designed to be for a dark game, so all your lighting trick wont work. Plus, the editors are not precise enough with measurements and would take quite a system to be able to render the finer details in real time w/o stuttering. You'd have to make sure the client haad the comp to run it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
alaburb Posted August 21, 2004 Author Share Posted August 21, 2004 Here is a little substance for the discussion. This URL is the Pub I designed in Quake III a few years ago in all its glory: link: the Quake Pub Allow me to stress that it is not a WIP and needs no further criticism. It was just a student project of which I am quite proud. I had to really bend the program in order to strip it of the violence, speed, gravity, etc. I have posted to illustrate the capabilities and limitations of the technology circa 2001...and yes, its cheeziness is part of its charm. I just wonder if things have moved on since then... why don't we have realtime GI ? (JK) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sketchrender Posted August 21, 2004 Share Posted August 21, 2004 Hi I looked in to this for while too, and wrote to a few companies for info on the different engines. Also went to a few gaming shops here in ireland to ask if they would have any ideas on how to get the liciencing rights to use it in the architecture business, as at an early stage clients love to flick around the proposal. I have to say the licencing is a major cost. I had a vision of being able to give a client a cd with model loaded and the engine on it to and so they could bring it with them to meeting walk around. But I have to say i sort of gave up, as I was hitting dead ends all the time, i would love to someone else try and get the ball rolling. I am sure Axiom's walkaround software for microstation is based on just these principles. There is a neech in the market for this and some should right a free piece of software and we'd all be the happier for it. but everybody wants to rich , don't we mister gates. phil Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
alaburb Posted August 21, 2004 Author Share Posted August 21, 2004 I wonder how many times bigger the blood-thirsty teenage games market is than the CGarchitect market? 100? 1,000? 1,000,000? If there was money in it (i'm assuming) someone would have done it by now. Surely Discreet would have bought out some crap game company and used their engine to output from Max and Autocad.... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Richard McCarthy Posted August 22, 2004 Share Posted August 22, 2004 Cool stuff Alaburb !! I know I shouldn't be criticizing DOOM 3 engine but I am just saying there are limitations in it that makes it not as worthwhile as a engine to model or output your stuff on it. For one thing, I think Far Cry would be a much better engine for archviz. It has all the tricks DOOM3 can do, and MORE! Large open outdoor space with millions of trees is no problem for Far Cry, and it can handle both indoor and outdoor at the same time with no problem (and no load time; unless it's some really large cave) Plus it has all the bells and whistles Doom3 has, such as normal mapping, bump mapping, specular mapping, stencil shadow.... Other good thing about Far Cry, WATER! bet you havn't seen that in Doom3 yet ) Oh also a bunch of rasteriser effects (eg. heat haze, distortion, etc) are already implemented in Far Cry with greater efficiency because it does not require you to have DX9 card to see those effect. (I have GF4 Ti... runs pretty smooth in 1024x768 with all the effects turn on) Another thing I notice is that, DOOM3 has implemented a nice shadow "fading" technique, you rarely see this though, as action is usually too fast. It makes the shadow look soft and fades out to the edge, but I think most of the time, it just doesn't look as good as soft (low resolution) stencil shadow that blurs due to low res effect. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Richard McCarthy Posted August 22, 2004 Share Posted August 22, 2004 Hi I looked in to this for while too, and wrote to a few companies for info on the different engines. Also went to a few gaming shops here in ireland to ask if they would have any ideas on how to get the liciencing rights to use it in the architecture business, as at an early stage clients love to flick around the proposal. I have to say the licencing is a major cost. I had a vision of being able to give a client a cd with model loaded and the engine on it to and so they could bring it with them to meeting walk around. But I have to say i sort of gave up, as I was hitting dead ends all the time, i would love to someone else try and get the ball rolling. I am sure Axiom's walkaround software for microstation is based on just these principles. phil Have you try Cubicspace rTre ??... it's relatively cost effective, quite cheap actually if you compare that to licensing a mere Quake 3 engine which would cost you $250,0000 USD. It output straight from VIZ/MAX and is design specifically for archVIZ... If you havn't try it : http://www.turbosquid.com/HTMLClient/FullPreview/FullPreview.cfm/ID/218794/intType/7/stgCHSource/Feature Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Crazy Homeless Guy Posted August 22, 2004 Share Posted August 22, 2004 the latest issue of Architecture Magazine has an article about this very subject. i don't think it is online, at least not yet. it does not go into depth, but talks generally about it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
alaburb Posted August 23, 2004 Author Share Posted August 23, 2004 Thanks for pointing out Far Cry Richard. Looks a little flat, but that could well be down to the painterly maps these games tend to use... In another vein... there was a cool game by ubisoft called XIII. What excited me was the possibility of a real time toon shading engine.... Check it out: XIII I was really excited to be able to walk around inside these really sleek cartoonish drawings of the model. Alas, Ubisoft gave absoultely no support to the mapping community for this game and I don't think that much has ever been done with it. Graphically this was one of the coolest games I have ever seen, but the gameplay absolutely sucked.... NEWay... Since you are very much up on these different engines, do you think Half-Life 2 will hold more potential for Architectural applications? I saw a video demonstrating the shading capabilities and gameplay and my jaw dropped. The shading was beautiful... Half-Life 2 Videos As I understand it the plan is to plug it into XSI. Not my modeling package of choice, but a good excuse to learn it. link: XSI for Half-Life 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Richard McCarthy Posted August 23, 2004 Share Posted August 23, 2004 From the screenshots, Half life 2 certainly look interesting, I have no yet seen many video of it except some demonstration of normal mapping video. So, I guess every judgement have to wait till the game comes out. As for XIII, I think it's certainly an interesting looking game, there are a lot of other games nowadays that use toon shaders, but most of these games are on PS2. The effect it use is certainly not new, you can even do it easily with VRML, or any other 3D software. The trick is simply to duplicate your geometry, and "inverse" (or reverse the normal) of the duplicate geometry. Next, you enlarge/scale the duplicate slightly larger than original..the difference in size is the thickness of the outline effect. Then, you simply apply a dark color (or any colour) of the duplicate geometry as the outline color. Try it. it's quite fun So, if you can't wait for UBI to put support for MODing XIII, you can always do it with any other engine with the above method (Even with old Quake III, it's been done many times) There IS AN ISSUE with this method though...it's not very efficient, and the polygon count tends to be large (2X) so, you really have to model very efficiently (super low polygon count modeling method...) And it tends to make the models very jaggy and angular. Another "better" method is to done it in code, using outline tracing at rasteriser stage. It can be done in OpenGL or DX 3D easily too, check gamedev.net or Nehe for sourcecode... I have seen tutorials there. This method tends to be much more efficient, and have nicer looking outline ; not limited to low polygon model, and it doesn't have the shortcome of looking very angular. On the horizon, I think the game "S.T.A.L.K.E.R" is more promising and interesting as an engine, it supports real-time HDRI (supposely!) and couple of other interesting features that I can't remember top of my head... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
alaburb Posted August 23, 2004 Author Share Posted August 23, 2004 Sorry to sound like an overly eager puppy, but has anyone else seen the HDRI demo film from Valve (Half-Life 2 makers)? If you are interested in the future of CGI look no farther... Below is the link. Click to wait in line and download the .exe movie. Well worth the wait and the 100+MB filesize. Most people here wish they could get their Max renders to look like this, let alone expect expect to walk around in it real time.... Seeing is believing... link: HL2 Movie Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
alaburb Posted August 23, 2004 Author Share Posted August 23, 2004 Richard, I looked at a video for STALKER and it really blew. Sorry to say... Its nice to see a Russian Team developing a game, but it looks way out of date. Just check out the HL2 link above. I think it is fair to say that they have resolved all of our architectural issues... shadows are very nice (check out the bug). wonderful volumetric lighting. wet surfaces look very wet. They even flip on two mirror balls with bump mapping to prove that they are reflecting the HDRI map. What I think is so great about Half-Life (as compared to Doom3 particularly) is that it is set in a wide variety of 'real world' settings. Therefore outdoor lighting is supported rather than the monotone of dungeons and corridors Doom only caters for. Also take a peak over at XSI to see the support pages and forums already in place. Oh yeh, you can also download a free version of XSI set up for mapping in the Valve Engine. Very nice.... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Richard McCarthy Posted August 26, 2004 Share Posted August 26, 2004 Yeh, I just saw the HL2 movie you suggested. Quite impressive! The HDRI demonstration looks good, but I still feel it's not true HDRI. It "REALLY" is just an extension of the old tech of 2 years ago... "cubic mapping" (demonstrated by nvidia) with some good bump mapping added to it. TRUE HDRI should affect the shadow as light is coming from the BACKGROUND. The doesn't seems to be the case here in the HL2 demonstration. But nevertheless it's still very impressive and now I will also eager awaits HL2 (and STALKER.. hehe I still think Stalker is impressive) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Richard McCarthy Posted August 31, 2004 Share Posted August 31, 2004 ftp://ftp.sunet.se/pub/games/PC/gamershell/movie/03_HL2-Tenements.zip ftp://ftp.sunet.se/pub/games/PC/gamershell/movie/05_HL2-Ravenholm.zip ftp://ftp.sunet.se/pub/games/PC/gamershell/movie/hl2-intro.zip ftp://ftp.sunet.se/pub/games/PC/gamershell/movie/hl2-trainstation.zip ftp://ftp.sunet.se/pub/games/PC/gamershell/movie/hl2_2004trailer_1024_q01.zip Some more Half-Life 2 demonstration... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
alaburb Posted August 31, 2004 Author Share Posted August 31, 2004 Thanks for these Richard - nice not to have to wait in line at Game Spy.... Any chance you will be playing around with the XSI for HL2 any time soon? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Richard McCarthy Posted December 29, 2004 Share Posted December 29, 2004 I just finished playing Half Life 2 few days ago, (XMAS present).. it was an absolutely amazing game indeed. Here are some screen captures of the amazing scenery and the technology in action There are some moments that I just gaze at the architecture in awe..... Remember these screenshots really don't do this justice. The effect of everything from projected shadow + fading, specular lighting, cubic environment mapping (Valve says it's HDRI ?? haha), realistic animation, pre-calculated radiosity..etc combine with the fact that it runs at 1024 x 768 @ 60 frames per second really makes this... an extraordinary experience. How these relate to architecture and CG architecture? I don't know. I just know it may very well be what we use one day to present to our client. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Richard McCarthy Posted December 29, 2004 Share Posted December 29, 2004 Some more ... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Richard McCarthy Posted December 29, 2004 Share Posted December 29, 2004 Last few.. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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