Architectural Visualisation

News & General Discussion
1

Hello all.

I have been investigating the use of Unity3D to produce decent quality architectural visualizations, that clients are able to interact with, and move around.

I work at a firm specializing in this field, and we are interested in hearing other peoples opinions on the feasibility of such a use of Unity.

Would Unity be a good choice for this? Would we be able to play pre-rendered .mov files in the engine? Would scripting things like information boxes etc. be too difficult? What kind of finish could we expect to use within a browser? What kind of texture resolutions are recommended?

We look forward to your replies!

2

Browse around the “Showcase” forum for examples of archvis projects. SJM Tech has posted some of the better projects, including this one here: http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/95893-3D-Mining-Complex-Virtual-Tour-(final-version)

3

play pre-rendered .mov files in the engine is just a use of a movietexture.
for the information boxes etc use playmaker
I did some tests in the field of architectural visualizations using beast lightmapper instead of vray see my results below,
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/91693-Archexteriour-scene-conversion
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/91689-Evermotion-attic-room

4

Unity is a great choice for this. However:

  1. many of the people coming from architectural visualization don’t understand optimization. They create very heavy meshes and as a result get poor performance
  2. if you use a CAD program like Revit the meshes generated will be really heavy, you’d need to reduce the polygons in 3ds max or something
  3. you’re better off just making a low poly version in the first place using a 3d modeling program and not an engineering program