Real Time Visualization of Apartment with customization and Touchscreen navigation.

[stormchaser]

This is an update of my previous Apartment Real Time Model. Now you can change the textures of Living room walls and Furniture. There is also a touchscreen version of the same presentation, you can navigate and change textures using touch gestures.

Check youtube video for Touch Screen Demo. The online webplayer allows customization feature with right click. Remember changing textures is only available in living room area.

 

Webplayer Link (27 mb, so kindly wait for it to load) / requires Unity3d plugin

Real Time Architecture - Apartment - Webplayer

 

Youtube Link

 

Screens

 

 

[Shaun Hamm]

Very nice work. Alot better than the one i've seen before that lets you toggle materials. Did you bake lightmaps with Vray or use Unity's in game lightmapping, Beast?

 

PS...I found a area that didn't have a collider. The wall behind the plant sitting on the floor next to the TV. I had backed into that corner to get a overall view of the place and fell out, lol.

 

Edited March 4, 2013 by shaunph78

[stormchaser]

oh damn, yes there is no collider on the wall surrounding the shelf area, ill update it next time i upload it, what happened was first i created a simple wall for colliders then i needed collider and raycast hit on the walls that change texture so i got rid of that collider and added collider to rest of the walls but since this walls material doesnt change i forgot to add collider to this one. thanks for pointing it out.

yes i bake all my lightmap in vray, i see no use of using beast, for two reason. one i already know how to use vray and scenes are already set up for max rendering so no point of doing it all over in beast. second i dont need the realtime lights and shadows so no use of advance beast lightmap settings. perhaps in my next external scene with terrain ill use beast in selected areas.

[John Dollus]

I jumped off of the balcony in the bedroom. Perhaps make it so you can't do that as well.

[stormchaser]

I jumped off of the balcony in the bedroom. Perhaps make it so you can't do that as well.

thanks for pointing that out John, I'll fix that too next time I upload the files.

[Scott Schroeder]

The advantage of Beast is that you don't need a custom pre-baked material for every object in your scene. You can easily reduce the number of materials and draw culls so your scene performs better on any machine. All of those pre-baked Vray maps can seriously crush some lower to medium end graphics cards for larger scenes. What resolution did you render out your maps?

 

However, the disadvantage is that Beast isn't as high of quality as you can get with baking out Vray maps. So it's a toss up. I think for an outside scene you'd be best off with at least using real time shadows if you want to use trees or objects blowing in the wind, but you don't need to use Beast for that either. If you keep everything static, baking may still be the way to go or at least bake out the environment light and use a sun in Unity to generate your sunlight and shadows.

 

All in all, this is probably one the best examples I've seen using Unity or any other engine as far as interaction and overall quality. Did you use the stock Unity materials or did you write your own shader? When I last played around, I found their stock material shaders to be lacking so I wrote my own using the Strumpy Shader editor to mimic the vray material in Max.

[stormchaser]

You are absolutely right Scott that beast is perhaps easier and you save time by not baking all the objects in max, and surely its easy on drawcalls too and you can run it on almost any system (at least a presentation this small). but unfortunately the quality isnt there, the archviz people are so spoiled when it comes to quality that even smallest of compromise is not acceptable. the maps for walls, ceiling, floor are rendered in 2k resolution but limited to 1k for webplayer (i think even 512 would look the same for web), sofas and carpet are 1k, smaller objects are 512 and even as low as 256.

I too used Strumpy's Shader editor for all my materials. but didnt do anything fancy with it just created more types of lightmap materials the one that come with unity are limited (no reflective lightmap or alpha cut out lightmap).

i am dying to work on an exterior scene and experiment with all the ideas i have for exterior but so far no exterior project.

i was thinking the same abt baking exterior scene with environmental light and ambient occlusion and using unity direct light to generate shadows but unity's soft shadows kinda suck, i dont know what improvements they have made in unity4 but in my previous experiments on 3.5 the soft shadows were not acceptable at all.

and thanks for your kind words Scott.

[John Dollus]

Must have been a rough day that day as running into the bedroom and jumping off was the first thing I did

[Scott Schroeder]

The thing that helps architecture is we don't do the massive environments that games do. Our scenes are more focused, so we can get away with higher poly counts and higher texture maps. It helps to still optimize but we can be a lot more lax than most games.

 

When you unwrapped your objects, did you do it by hand or use a plug-in or a combo of both? Did you make sure that areas that won't be see get a smaller part of the UVW space or did you just let the program crank things out? I take it your walls are separate objects or are they all pulling off the same UVW texture?

[stormchaser]

The thing that helps architecture is we don't do the massive environments that games do. Our scenes are more focused, so we can get away with higher poly counts and higher texture maps. It helps to still optimize but we can be a lot more lax than most games.

 

When you unwrapped your objects, did you do it by hand or use a plug-in or a combo of both? Did you make sure that areas that won't be see get a smaller part of the UVW space or did you just let the program crank things out? I take it your walls are separate objects or are they all pulling off the same UVW texture?

 

sorry for a late reply Scott, i only got mail notification of John's post.

yes youre right abt getting away with high poly, when i started my experiments with unity i was so careful that id delete even single polygons to keep the model light but now i have some rough idea of the limits. but i think its a good practice to keep the model light cause you might end up building a big environment such as a whole site with a few towers or maybe few streets. of course even in small projects you cant use evermotion's library since they are just too high in polycount (unnecessary at times) but you can always make a lowpoly on top of their model and bake diffuse and normal.

the unwrapping is a mix of one click solution and manually unwrapping and uvpacking. for objects which are going to be dominant in the scene and take more screen space i pack them manually. i dont want to waste even one pixel in a 2k texture. but if its just a 256k texture and something like a plant i let flatiron do its magic (which is a combo of unwrella and uvpacker). but i dont use flatiron to bake since it only bakes one element at a time. so if you want to do completemap and totallightingmap both you have to render twice.

wall textures are divided based on interaction, group of walls that change their texture with right click on any of the wall from their group share same texture.