CGarchitect reviews new AEC Presentation Suite

QUADRISPACE PRESENTATION SUITE
By Jeff Mottle (jmottle@cgarchitect.com)



Have you ever needed to show your client 2D drawings and 3D models during a presentation, but didn't have a way to tie them all together in one complete package? Have you ever wanted to create an interactive presentation, but didn't know how? Up until now, unless you had experience programming interactive multimedia software, chances are pretty good that you have run into these roadblocks. Thanks to a new software by QuadriSpace Corporation, Architects, designers and CG professionals alike can now put together professional looking interactive presentations that can incorporate all of your digital presentation material.

In this review, we will take an in-depth look into the features and functionality of QuadriSpace's new AEC Presentation Suite.

INTERFACE

Upon first installing the application, you are greeted with a fairly familiar looking interface. Very much like many other windows presentation packages, most people should feel quite comfortable navigating through the menus. However, with a little experimentation you will quickly find that this is no ordinary presentation tool.
Hidden under the rather unassuming interface lies several powerful features that set this tool a step in front of the rest.

One of the features that I particularity liked was the Overview Tree. A tree view of all of your pages and page content, the Overview Tree allows you to quickly access any page and page properties quickly without having to be on that page already - very handy if you have a large presentation with a lot of content. This view also allows you to re-order pages and connect views, which I'll explain later.
The second part of the interface that I liked was the ability to graphically view most of the controls, shapes and views available to be inserted on your presentation pages, using the create list. By simply double clicking an icon, the content gets inserted on the page without having to navigate a text menu. Although not a very big deal, I would have preferred the ability to drag and drop from the create list, rather than double click, which assumes the location that I want to place the new content.
 

	Presenter Interface with Overview Tree	Presenter interface with Create List	Quadrispace Viewer

APPLICATION

I'll start first by walking through the basics. There are three parts to the Presentation Suite: The Presenter, the Viewer and the Exporter. The Presenter allows you to author and preview all of your interactive presentations while the Viewer, a royalty free browser, enables you or your clients view your presentations without the need for a full suite installation. You can include the viewer on CD or have your clients download it from the Internet. The last component, the Exporter, allows users to export 3D geometry, textures, lighting and cameras from Autodesk VIZ or 3DS MAX into a format useable by the Presenter.

PRESENTER

Views

The Presenter has all of the tools that you would commonly expect in presentation software, like text boxes, drawing tools, image insertion, font selection etc., but much of its hidden power lies in the view windows. Upon creating a new page you can insert four types of view windows. The Orbit, Section, Walkthrough and Drawing View windows are, for lack of a better term, "portals" to your media. Rather than inserting a simple bitmap on the page, the view windows are different in that they give you the ability to interact with your media.

To insert a window, you simply select the desired view type from the insert menu, or click a view in the Create List. This automatically places a window on your page that can be re-sized or re-positioned as required.
Upon insertion of an Orbit window you need simply to double click the window and choose the type of media you wish to view in that window. You can choose from a proprietary QuadriSpace geometry file (*.QSM), that was created by the exporter, or a standard 3DS file. Now this is where things get interesting. With a file selected you switch from Edit mode to Live mode and voila your Orbit view is now an interactive OpenGL window that allows you to orbit, zoom and pan your geometry file, just as though you were in VIZ or MAX. You can move around your model interactively during the presentation and point out all of the details to your client without being restricted to a set animation or photograph, and without having to have VIZ or MAX installed.
 

	View insertion and connection	Orbit view in completed presentation - Edit mode	Drawing view in completed presentation - Live mode

 

The drawing view is almost identical to the orbit window, but is a 2D version, and accepts DWG and DXF file formats. In live mode you will be able to pan and zoom around your drawing, just as though you were in the CAD package that created the original file.

The last two view windows, Sectional and Walkthrough, also allow you to interact with your 3D models, but add another dimension of interactivity. By themselves, these views allow you to view a section of your model and interactively walk though your scene. The walkthrough mode even features full collision detection. You can navigate though the environment using your mouse, and run into wall and furniture without passing right through them. But, when you get to a set of stairs you can easily walk up them.

For users who would rather have an animation, that can be recorded and played back during the presentation, you can use the Presenter's record tool. This tool allows you to record any view manipulations made in a view window.
 

	Walkthrough view in completed presentation - Live mode	Linked drawing view and Walkthrough view - Live mode	Synchronization Tool Interface

 

Drawing Synchronization/Linking

Another very impressive feature is the ability to link sectional and walkthrough views together. So, what does this mean? With sectional and walkthrough views linked, you are able to navigate the scene while observing you exact position in the section view.
Users who have both a 2D CAD drawing and a 3D model can link a drawing view and a walkthrough view, which allows you to view your exact position in the environment and on the CAD drawing, rather than the sectional view.

Now you might be asking yourself how you can link a CAD drawing to a 3D environment. Thanks to a unique synchronization tool you need simply to relate three common points in both CAD drawing and 3D model and the models become synchronized.

Presentation Customization

As I described earlier you have access to most of the same tools that you do in many other presentation packages. However, because this is an interactive presentation tool, there are new controls that you would typical have to program yourself in a traditional multimedia-programming package. These interactive controls will allow you to: create icons on you page to move between pages, launch web browsers, launch e-mail programs, execute exterior applications, create links to other Quadrispace presentations as well as help, user settings and exit buttons.
Users can also use the external program execution buttons to lauch other media like Quicktime movies or MPEGS.
 

	Available controls

 

THE EXPORTER

The second part of the AEC Presentation Suite, the exporter, allows you to import models directly from MAX or VIZ to create QSM files, which can be loaded into the Presenter. Currently the exporter can support the following features:

• All geometry that can be represented as a triangle mesh.
• Standard materials
• Multi-Sub Objects
• Bitmap textures if in one of the following Texture Map types:
   - Diffuse Color Map
   - Bump Map
   - Self Illumination Map
• Direct, Spot and Omni Lights
• Cameras

Although your lights can be imported, your files are not raytraced so some effects will obviously not show up, and complex realistic renders may not look as good. For that reason they have allowed users the ability to use files that have been generated by Lightscape, a photo realistic radiosity renderer. While you cannot directly import Lightscape files, you can use Lightscape's mesh to texture feature to generate light maps of the realistic lighting. In Lightscape ,these textures can be set up to replace the vertex lighting so that either or both the indirect or direct illumination can be imported into MAX/VIZ as "baked" on texture maps. From MAX or VIZ the file can then be exported as a QSM file.
 

		Export menu in MAX/VIZ

 

There are however a few things to consider. As the views used by the viewer are OpenGL windows, the amount of data that can be moved around and navigated through will be directly related to the system video card. If you are using a higher end laptop or your workstation to run the presentation, you shouldn't have too much trouble with larger more complex presentations, within reason of course. If you are going to be sending your presentation to your client, you should ensure that either the client has a video card able to handle your presentation, or make sure that your model, textures and overall presentation size are smaller and more efficient.

I spent a fair bit of time importing several models, some as high as 163,000 polys with quite complex modeling and was very impressed with how well it imported the geometry. As far as I could tell the geometry imported exactly as it appeared in MAX/VIZ. File sizes for the presentation will of course vary depending upon how big you original models are. From what I could tell the final presentation size was pretty close to the combined total of all of the imported files and models.

THE VIEWER

The last part of the suite, the viewer, is a scaled down version of the Presenter. The exception being that you cannot edit presentations with the viewer. The Viewer is royalty free and can be provided on CD with you presentation or downloaded from the Internet. The downloaded viewer size is 1.73MB, so small enough for any Internet user to download. Another interesting part of the viewer is that you can configure the presentation to be viewed in different aspect ratios, including systems that have dual monitors and widescreen displays.

 

		Page Orientation setup

 

CONCLUSION

Overall I found the AEC Presentation Suite to be very easy to use and a quite powerful tool. The only drawback to this program is that it is limited by the power of your or your client's video card. Also, in order to create smaller file sizes, you will need to pay close attention to how large and complex your models get and how big you make your textures, something that you may not have had to do if you were going straight to a render or a typical animation.
The program was only just made public a little over a month ago, so there are still a few small bugs here and there, but I found the support team at Quadrispace to be very quick to post patches and updates.
During my testing, support for VIZ 4 for was also released, and although the current build does not allow users to export any of the radiosity information, I was told Radiosity support would be fast tracked for the next major release. They seem to be developing the program quite quickly, as evidenced by their frequent news updates, so I wouldn't expect it to be too long.
The full Presentation Suite sells for $995 US and includes a full 30 day money back guarantee. Quadrispace also offers a trial version that can be downloaded from their site.
To conclude, if you are in the market for a tool that will allow you to create your own professional looking interactive presentations and don't have the time to learn a multimedia programming package or you simply want to have all of your media in one presentation, then I think the Presentation Suite is definitely worth a look.

QuadriSpace Website

 

Jeff Mottle is an architectural visualization artist currently working in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. He is the editor and owner of CGarchitect.com and is an active member in the architectural CG community. With just over five years of experience using Autodesk's Lightscape, Jeff has become one of the top Lightscape artists in North America.

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