Virtual Reality / Interactive Walk-through

[Anonymous]

Hi everyone

My firm recently purchased ZERMATT, which works effortlessly with ArchiCAD to generate interactive walk-throughs from a 3D model.

Apart from ZERMATT, does anyone know if there are similar softwares out there that does something like that, with greater realism in terms of image quality? Thanks!

Shawn

[Anonymous]

I don't think there is, it's hard for a computer too render great realism in 'realtime'. I think Zermatt use same technic that most computergame does.
And in ArchiCad - Zermatt combination, you use your ArchiCad materials in Zermatt and this material don't use latest shadertechnic that you've seen in computergames.
And to get greater realism in materials/lights you often have to do uv-unwraps of textures and use alot of layers of textures.

Do you need all this? greater realism -> more textures & alot of more work -> alot of time, time most don't have.

/Tobias

[Anonymous]

Hi Tobias

Hmm...in that case, do u happen to know any "computer-game" VR creators/render engines that work with ArchiCAD?

[Anonymous]

There are alot of opensource gameengines that you could use if you have a bit of C++ knowledge, there are also some gameengines that you could start without any cooding, maybe a little scripting, but scripting an VR for one modell are probably rather easy.

But a direct convert from ArchiCad to this engines are not give you that realism you are searching for so you have to convert your model to for example 3d Studio or Maya and use materials that support latest shadertechnics.

Search on gamedev forums, there is alot of them and there you could find most of the info you need.

[Anonymous]

for architectural walkthrough complex shaders are not necessary. shaders can be quite simple. the problem is lighting. and you cannot compute realistic lighting in realtime. most of what you see in games is precomputed. game engines just calculate direct diffuse lighting and specular. all GI is baked into the textures.
so unless you use an application that's capable of GI and render to texture (like 3dsmax) you vill never get even close to what you see in games. no matter what engine you use.

[Anonymous]

zucoc wrote:
for architectural walkthrough complex shaders are not necessary. shaders can be quite simple. the problem is lighting. and you cannot compute realistic lighting in realtime.

No, exactly, no computer have that capacity, there are gamelevels that takes over a week to compute lightmaps on fast computers.
Even Zermatt calculate lightmaps before you can walk around.
But Shingo wants better realism than Zermatt, and for that you'll need more complex shaders.
But self I think Zermatt is doing more than a great job, I like it alot.

[stefan]

Quest 3D is very capable, but hard to use, expensive and there is no ArchiCAD integration. Oh, and Windows only.

Half-Life2 is nice as well, if you model your scene in the Hammer editor... Windows only.

VRML browsers are fine (and freely available), but the lighting model in these browsers is soooo limited. Cortona is cross-platform.

[Anonymous]

Are there any fellow ZERMATT users out there who would like to share their opinions and experiences with using it?

Shawn

[Anonymous]

if u have any tutorials plz give me about lightong and render settings

[Anonymous]

Well check out blender3d game engine. If i remember corectly you prerender the scene with texture an then somehow you can walkthrough