Zermatt [and in 2009: Virtual Building Explorer]

[Anonymous]

Has anybody heard some news about the zermatt engine? We know it sort of stopped beeing developed any further but any idea if there is still a future for this product?

Thanks Carsten

[Thomas Holm]

Dead. Check http://www.zermatt.se/ :

"ANNOUNCEMENT
Zermatt is no longer supported or maintained
Due to our inability to properly maintain the software and provide service to customers, it has been decided that Zermatt will no longer be developed, maintained or supported. Current license owners will still be able to activate and use the current versions of their product via the reqistration dialog."

[Anonymous]

Surely this is an opportunity for graphisoft to step in and buy the rights to the software. This would be an amazing feature to have fully integrated into AC.

At the moment the openGL preview, although great for editing, isn't quite good enough for presentation to clients.

Lighting, shadows and collision detection are all features that are fundamental to providing a 'realistic' experience of a virtual space. Look at the most basic of first-person-shooters from 10 years ago. Even they provided a significantly more immersive experience than we have at the moment, on hardware that a modern mobile phone would put to shame.

Personally I think keep the openGL mode as it is. It is more than fast and fluid enough for editing and constructing the model. I would prefer to launch the 'realistic' preview on special occasions only as the lighting and shadows would take several minutes to calculate on a complex model (although considerably faster than rendering an animation).

The inclusion of these features in AC would be be a massive selling point over the competition. Graphisoft need to do something brave and exciting to entice people and get noticed.

We definitely need to lobby graphisoft to do this.

[Anonymous]

I totally agree, as a zermatt license holder it is sad that it has been discontinued. Such a fantastic product - though the support was never there and bugs in v10 never got fixed (accessoriess bug).
But GS should snap this product up and integrate it with ArchiCAD. Having a walkthrough model that can be emailed, time limited, radiosity enabled etc etc has been terrific.
If zermatt had a more realistic price (like 200eu), every ArchiCAD user would of purchased.
Plus the other (Dark) side has nothing like it

[Anonymous]

There is alot of things that could have been done better than it was in Zermatt. So it is better to create a new product instead of working with the original code of Zermatt.

[Anonymous]

Archi-Guy wrote:
Having a walkthrough model that can be emailed, time limited, radiosity enabled etc etc has been terrific.

Talking about good quality interactive web 3D walkthrough that can be emailed etc., anybody tried Vitruvian Studio ?

[Anonymous]

TurboGlider wrote:
There is alot of things that could have been done better than it was in Zermatt. So it is better to create a new product instead of working with the original code of Zermatt.

Like what? The interface was criptic but on a whole it was a great product

[Anonymous]

I don't say it wasn't a great product, sure it was, I like it alot.

What I said was that there is too much that could be done better so I think it's better to make a new software instead of work with todays Zermatt.

[Anonymous]

thanks guys for the feed back, unfourtunatley nothing new for me. I totaly agree that graphisoft should implement this. This would give ArchiCAD another edge to Revit. We tried other software like this and it is hard to find. Most of them are to expensive and to hard to use.

No need for a new code either, we exported a 30MB 3D ArchiCAD file ( only 3D parts no, lines, sections etc.) in 8 min, settings automatic in Zermatt just awesome. The Zermatt.exe file was 24MB and the great thing is no need for any plug ins to download for the client it just works.

Let's hope someone picks up this great software.

Cheers Carsten

[Anonymous]

Carstene wrote:
The Zermatt.exe file was 24MB and the great thing is no need for any plug ins to download for the client it just works.

It is much better to get an optimized/compressed VRML file of 1 MB from the same ArchiCAD 3D file if the client only needs to download a 1,5 Mb freeware plug-in that works on standard computer with standard video-card.