Hey everyone! I am an architecture and computer science student. Personally I have started Unity game development for about 3 months.
Every year, architecture schools around the world produce tons of thousands digital models. These digital models could be of existing classics, some modern ones designed by students, or some futuristic imagined by students that cant really be built yet (due to physical constrains). About 80% of these models are built in Rhino and with some simple scripting, we can implement them inside unity into digital space for the users to walk inside the architecture to experience and learn from it, etc.
I myself am genuinely interested in exploring such a platform. Yet I am not sure how technically challenging this project might be so I might need some head start on what to research upon (or simply to call me off telling me this isnt possible). I am picturing this application/ webpage for users to be able to upload their 3D model, they then can set the material (or should this happen in the respective 3D software first), lighting, annotations, etc. Viewers can then walk around the architecture in first person, comment text/ video link on a specific 3D point. What do you guys foresee to be the most difficult part of this service?
The most difficult part would be writing loader for rhino3d format. And keeping performance decent
You can make an application in unity which will load and then display a model off the web. That’s not a very big deal. A difficult part, however, will be loading it from rhino 3d format.
Additionally unity does not exactly have good facilities for displaying html pages within the game if you were planning that.
Lastly, performance. Usually for maximum performance you’d want to preapre the model within unity which would generate occulsion data. If the users are uploading it dynamically, oclusion data would be missing.
Aside from loading rhino models and possibility of running into performance issues, I do not really think there will significant issues.
Do be aware, that depending on what you’re trying to load into the world, “performance” can become a big issue.