Note:
I have made a few tweak based on recommendations from you guys. I hope it runs smoother and loads faster without all the weird artifacts present. I still haven’t changed the screen material but I hope to get that done soon.
I’ve created a small demo of a 3D house plan that one of my clients currently sells. It’s meant to be a simple turntable style navigation with mouse wheel zoom. I am particularly interested in how it performs on older hardware since my computer is a 2010 iMac with an ati 5750 card. Of course, I would appreciate any suggestions to make it more intuitive and engaging without being overly complicated (targeted toward potential homeowners not gamers). Thanks in advance!
Well my machine isn’t exactly low end… so it would mean much that it ran “smoothly”…
One thing you should definitely add is mouse drag to rotate… if you hold down a mouse button you can rotate by moving the mouse left and right.
But it seems like I didn’t see the correct material on the side of the house… I was looking a deep blue.
Also I couldn’t quite determine if the lines on the roof is caused by bump map or triangles… the oddly pixelated look suggests triangles, but I would recommend bump maps for details like that. Or triangles plus bumpmaps if you wanna go all out.
I’ve been looking for a mouse drag script on the unifycommunity site but I did find a mouse orbit script, maybe there is an easy way to add a mouse click function to enable instead it of having it run continuously (I would like to learn how so I can use it on my FPS camera as well). You are right about the roof the triangles and the bump map not matching up. I might try to look for a double sided material for the standing seams on the roof and line up the texture. Thanks for the suggestion, I hope to post an update today.
A couple of observations. Might have to tweak the shadow bias or quality, I was seeing artifacting of the shadow breaking up on the roof of the home. Secondly you’ll probably want to use a soft alpha, not a cutoff alpha for the screen on the back porch. There was a lot of texture scintillating going on back there (weird white flickering artifacting). Just comes from using cutoff alpha on very tiny (closely compacted) alpha sections. Other than that looks pretty good to me. I would say throw in some grass, sidewalks and trees just to make it feel like a more “whole” experience in the visualization.
Thanks for the advice, I will try to keep tweaking with the Beast settings which are a bear to get right. I can’t seem to escape the artifacts with Beast on my architectural models, it’s really frustrating. I will try to tweak the bias and maybe use path tracing as the secondary integrator. Noob question, how would I create a soft alpha on the back porch? Again thanks for the comments and advice.
Oh the soft alpha…would be thus. Take a look at the texture you have for the rear screen. If it has an alpha channel look and see if the white edges are very sharp or blurry. If it’s a PNG and the alpha is built in…look at the edges of your screen textures…are they sharp or blurry. Just blur the edges to make it a softer alpha…and do not use a cutoff alpha shader. Use a standard alpha shader.
Thanks, I will give that a try. I did find out from an architect friend of mine that is was crashing his laptop. I switched the rendering path from deferred to vertex lit since I am using light maps and it worked fine afterward. As for adding the landscape I am trying to keep the loading and rendering times as low as possible right now.
