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Penthouse Walkthrough


LongMozart
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With your experience with Unity can you tell us how it compares to Lumion. Does Unity have a cost model for Architectural firms. Does it handle geometry imports well.

I have taken a serious look at Cryengine 3, but it was too expensive - so we went with Lumion. But we liked having more options with a real game engine - Unity would be another good option for us.

 

thanks!

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I am happy to share my thoughts. I am a computer scientist specializing in graphics. I am not from the architecture background at all. But my father is an architect and I am working closely with him.

 

I think Unity is great, but requires technical knowledge (shaders, scripting, general computer graphics knowledge) to produce great results. This is true for any game engine.

 

Unity lacks some powerful features of CryEngine 3 or Unreal. But it is ALWAYS possible to implement those features in Unity. For example Unity does not really support a day lighting system but you can script it yourself. This of course requires some heavy knowledge in computer graphics. There are many user's projects that build day lighting system. For example, the UniSky day lighting systemis sold on Unity Asset Store for about 100 USD.

 

Interestingly, Unity does offer some features that cannot be found in CryEngine 3 and Unreal. The most important is perhaps the occlusion culling system. Which is EXTREMELY important when doing large arch viz projects (for example, urban design visualization).

 

Lumion is of course, a quick and easy-to-use tool. But for me it is extremely limited. First of all, I do NOT want to make moview, I want to create interactive 3D environments, that is why I use real-time rendering. If I want a movie then I will stick with V-Ray or something similar to get better result than Lumion. Lumion is good to produce quick and cheap visualization but I do not think that many "high-end" 3D artisit or visualizer use it. Also, Lumion's look is so monotonic. I can INSTANTLY recognize if a movie (on youtube for example) was produced by Lumion. They all share the same color tones, the same atmosphere, the same look. Even when they are post-processed, it is not hard to determine if they are Lumion's products.

 

Yes creating a real-time 3D environment requires using low-poly models. Even if an engine can handle lots of polygons, you still should optimize everything, textures, geometries. You must have the right attitude for optimization. We are not quite at the point where artists are not limited by the numbers of polygons or textures in real-time rendering.

 

Generally, if your visualization is used a few times or by a few people (for example, to help your clients visualize your idea), then maybe optimization does not really worth the time and effort. But most of our works here for example are used many times (by potential house buyers, tourist, etc) optimization is a must to ensure that users with not-so-fast computers can still enjoy our works.

Edited by LongMozart
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  • 2 weeks later...

Hi Nguyen, very nice work with unity 3d.. would love to have seen some of the vdo interactivity shown on the package exe. I just joined the CG forum and I am an kitchen & interior designer and a interactive Arch-visualiser. My fav softwares being Google SketchUp, Kerkythea, 3DMax, Macromedia ...ooops Adobe (Flash, PS, Premier) etc and my latest "obsession" is of course Unity 3D. I'm still learning it up and its seems like what i have been searching for all my life to be creative and interactive.

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