technical architecture.

Here is another Architectural interactive test project. This time, a laboratory setup, a tighter interior space, set up without any real lighting (1 direct light + ambient colors + Ambient Occlusion currently) created with the goal of customizing the unity asset pipeline to be a little more friendly for architectural work.

First, the Project, roughly 6mb, clicking on the screenshot will open the project in a new window. its another quickly evolving work in progress, Warning: No consideration has been taken currently for speed on older hardware, ~100fps on an 8800GT was the target.

Some findings and random ramblings on arch and interactive 3d:

• unlike with general gaming, with architecture you are in most cases going to already have a model provided in some form or another. odds are, the model is going to be pretty horrific, as arch models tend to be built for the purpose of either:
  • A: Viz… the Viz model will require a lot of cleanup in terms of material work, and stripping down a lot of the high poly fluff required for rendering.
  • B: Design Development… the DD model is normally plagued more by bad modeling conventions, no naming, poor materials, materials not fully assigned, or mangled geometry due to being stretched and squished for days on end to keep up with a design.
• you will probably still want to break up the file by some logical layer type system, by default this will land you with a unique material for each material of each fbx file
• a small AssetPostProcessor script that works on the OnMaterialAssign function can make the process of sharing materials across multiple FBX files much easier to handle, with the added bonus of being able to easily progressively build up a library of reusable realtime materials

 
//file: MaterialsPostProcessor.cs
//goal: Share a library of materials across different assets based on the name of material supplied in the FBX file
// Dave Buchhofer - 02.10.2010
 
using UnityEngine;
using UnityEditor;
using System.Collections;
 
public class MaterialsPostProcessor : AssetPostprocessor
{
    Material OnAssignMaterialModel (Material material, Renderer renderer)
    {
        //The path where you keep your "Standard" library of materials
        string StandardMatPath = "Assets/DMGStandardMaterials/" + material.name + ".mat";
 
        //the path where you want to keep your "temp" materials, that weren't found above
        //So you have a logical place to look for materials that need editing and tweaking for realtime work.
        string TemporaryMatPath = "Assets/Mesh/Materials/" + material.name + ".mat";
 
        //Check for it in the standard 
        if (AssetDatabase.LoadAssetAtPath(StandardMatPath, typeof(Material)))
        {
            Debug.Log("FOUND: " + StandardMatPath);
            return (Material)AssetDatabase.LoadAssetAtPath(StandardMatPath, typeof(Material));
        }
        //Else check to see if we've already built one in the temp path
        if (AssetDatabase.LoadAssetAtPath(TemporaryMatPath, typeof(Material)))
        {
            Debug.Log("FOUND temp: " + TemporaryMatPath);
            return (Material)AssetDatabase.LoadAssetAtPath(TemporaryMatPath, typeof(Material));
        }
        //Or create it?
        material.shader = Shader.Find("Diffuse");
        AssetDatabase.CreateAsset(material, TemporaryMatPath);
        Debug.Log("CREATED temp: " + TemporaryMatPath);
        return material;
    }
}

also check out the previous arch experiment a few posts down: Basketball Arena

Here’s a current work in progress Interactive Architectural type demo of a college Basketball Arena

it hasn’t been terribly optimized yet, so it requires a fairly hefty video card to play smoothly, that said, it runs at ~150fps on my 8800GT here, but at 5fps on my parents 3 year old dell. So your mileage may vary while I experiment!

http://www.buchhofer.com/upload/files/labs/drexel/ ~5mb

Everything has been done with ingame lighting and shaders, nothing is baked, and was meant as a test specifically for that purpose, to see how far it can be pushed before requiring Texture Baking on a fair sized scene. (With the aim to be able to quickly iterate models in earlier phases of design without having to unwrap and bake!)

To the game! There is a quality button on the lower left that toggles between various settings of Anti Aliasing, Shader Quality, Shadow Quality.. so you can tailor it to a point to your hardware.

On the upper left is a selection of preset Camera views, clicking and dragging the mouse button in the viewport anywhere will ‘look’ the camera from the preset view.

On the upper right is some fun stuff, toggles for Ambient occlusion, Bloom shaders (glow) and a couple of sliders to adjust those primary values

there is also an alternate Daylighting scheme, if you do this i suggest toggling the roof, then you can adjust the time of day with the ‘TimeOfDay’ slider, and the ambient lighting with the ambient.

the rest are just toggles to show/hide various layers of objects

Well, lets just say that dealing with large Revit files can get a little ugly for visualization purposes to say the least. there are several fundamental issues currently, ranging from workflows in building usable familys inside of revit, to dealing with the geometry after the fact for rendering.

I had the pleasure to again deal with a fairly large Revit model. It only weighed in at about 300mb to start! for working on final renderings thats all well and good, and not a real issue to deal with, but for mid project progress renders it can get a bit painful doing a lot of the deconstruction needed to make it useful to work in in 3dsMax. spending several hours ‘cleaning’ a revit model in max so that you can get any sort of rendering done is lets say, a bit depressing, when you know you’ll have to do the same process again in 2 weeks.

all that said, I started looking for some solutions to one small facet of the problem, and found some good case study testing on efficiently attaching a ton of meshes done by Dave Stewart and also a fair number of tips from the Maxscript crew at CGTalk

So I did a  small adaptation of Dave’s attachment script above, which can be found here: CollapseSelected-inParts5.ms Its not pretty, but we’ll get there soon enough.

It takes your current selection, and simplifies the number of objects by the square root (Dave’s tested optimal amount for speed collapsing!) its a work in progress, and i figure i’ll take this, combined with set of other tools for collapsing either by Selected Material, Similar Objects+Instances, Layer, and some name filtering. that should take the day long revit cleanup jobs and compress them down to an hour or so.

Yay.

A quick dmg reel one of the guys cooked up a few months back, page: EwingColeDMG
[kaltura-widget wid="jp5u0sa7ug" width="410" height="364" addpermission="3" editpermission="3" /]

testing out this Kaltura video plugin..

Here’s a useful one i made in 2003, one of my first scripts actually! posting it up because i find myself using it ~60 times a day on this current project with curved/angled bits all over it!

A Helper dialog to speed up working with custom Grids. Helps immensely in the workflow of angular modeling (read: silly modern architecture) when combined with a hotkey to create grid and autogrid >:)

Basics: It populates the dialog with all current grids in the scene, including the HomeGrid. you can double click on any grid to activate that, also has buttons to change the view to match the grid, and to select the current active grid. also includes a cycle of the Toolmodes (View/World/Parent/Screen/Local/Gimbal/Grid)

– if there are no grids in the scene, then toggle between the toolmodes
– if there is just 1 grid in the scene, toggle between it and the Home Grid
– if there are grids in the scene, open the window
– if there are grids in the scene and the window is already open, toggle between the grids

I’ve been a bit busy this month oversee’ing a fair sized animation project, so I’ve been a bit away from the scripting fun of late. There’s a few useful tricks I’ve picked up and will work out some posts shortly

Here’s a couple shot snippets from one of the latest projects. 2 out of 20ish from a pretty large site

Here’s the link to my old Gallery, complete with just exported from JAlbum sexiness, until I find a suitable way to integrate some of the newer work with the new site