Ideas for Walkthroughs

[Horizon]

I was wondering if it would be possible to create a 3D walkthrough using 3d max where the user could switch the lights on and off and just a lot more interaction with the environment, and maybe select the time of day to view the building from outside.

thnx

[mbr]

Sure, anything is possible, but it would not be easy. You would need to render out animations for each scenario, then put it together in either Director or Flash, for the interactivity.

[Horizon]

yeah so you would have to render a scene with the light on then off, so when the person chooses to have the light on the program would choose the appropriate scene.

Wonder how smooth the transition would be from viewing the room with the lights going on or off.

As for Director or Flash not sure really.

thnx

[mbr]

It depends on a few things. First is if it'll be running off of a hard drive or off of a CD (you can forget the web, unless you think people will wait for several animations to download - which they won't). Then it depends on teh CD speed.

If you are a savvy actionscipter/lingo scripter, you could probably get it to be pretty smooth (with the penalty of waiting), but I don't know for sure.

 

Director is the safest bet, as it accesses Quicktimes quickly. Flash is a little dangerous for CD animations/video because it will do nothing until the CD caches enough of the animation to start playing (you can't do a preloader, like a website). They may have worked around this, though.

Flash is nice because of Sorenen Squeeze, which is one of the best compression

 

Basically, I would figure this would at least triple the time of a normal animation, and that's assuming you know Director or Flash.

[tcorbett]

There are a few ways to do this.

 

mbr's Director suggestion is a good one, and probably the least difficult, though potentially a little choppy when switching between videos, plus you would have to have some timeline management programmed in.

 

There is also the flash / director solution that would involve sequencing still images, rather than running a full animation. Just fade in the images in sequence, maybe pull a slow pan while they are displayed, and swap them for the options. Much easier to build & control, but you lose the animation component.

 

A very difficult alternate on these would be to write an SMIL 2 file for RealPlayer that would switch between the videos or images. (SMIL = Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language)

 

Finally, possibly most difficult, Director has a realtime 3D component to it, but to make any real use of it, you need to know a good deal about programming Director. You could change the lighting / textures / cameras in real time, let your user fly through, etc. Upside is interactivity, and a filesize you would probably put on the web. Downside is you won't get the sharp rendering that you get from Max, and you'll be missing light effects - shadows, raytracing, etc.

 

Let us know how it turns out!

 

Tom...