Realtime Modelling

Realtime Modelling

by Halli Bjornsson AA Dipl. MD of Cadai Ltd, www.cadai.com

Introduction

Halli is educated as an architect but has worked in game development as artist, and art-director on titles published by Sony, Sega, Microsoft and others. Halli is now focusing on bringing affordable and easy to use real-time technology to architects with Cadai.

Why should you be interested in realtime?

The market for realtime modelling for architecture is still in it’s infancy but I think it’s just a matter of time before clients expect to see realtime versions of their projects both for them and their customers. It’s only a short while ago since rendered views of buildings and interiors were a novelty and I feel that the same will apply to realtime.

Realtime isn’t just a question of allowing your clients to walk around in their projects. The origin of most realtime tools derives from a game-developers need to be in their product during the design process. The shorter the feedback-loop, the better. This will increase the quality of the product, shorten the development time in the long run and reduce the risks of having invested in something that you discover doesn’t work once you’ve put it together. Making games is a team effort and having a realtime version of the project allows all team-members to see the project in the same way and understanding what the others are up to. This is where realtime is the most powerful.

Realtime can and will extend into the life of the building or environment that is being developed. There are quite a few companies that are using the format to extend their products for site management, local authorities, communications and sales of products. This is potentially the biggest market for realtime and I think it will far exceed what is required now for games in the future. Those who are best equipped to take advantage of this area in terms of content are I believe those who have insight into architecture and visualization.

Building a realtime model of a large area where your clients are likely to have projects or targeting a site which is labelled for development is a good idea and will give you an instant advantage over those who haven’t got such a model to offer the clients. It’s not as time-consuming as you might think and doesn’t require as much detail as you would with a render since the immediate impact of being able to walk around the site in realtime is considerable.

Where can you start in realtime?

A lot of you have dabbled in realtime but if you’re anything like me then the best way to go forward is when you can sell it as a part of your service once you have a demo to show.

There is some stunning work on the CGArchitect site in the gallery and I would recommend for a demo to simply convert one of your existing projects into realtime format. You might even be able to sell the same model twice to your client. It’s not as hard as you might think and you will already have done the hard work by building the model and setting up the lights in the scene.

The modelling standards for realtime are pretty universal across different engines. The reason is simply that most if not all 3D engines are defined by what the graphics-cards manufacturers dictate as well as those who define DirectX and OpenGL. Skills for one engine are therefore easily transferable across to another and you’ll find that most of your work is spent in your main modeller before exporting.

There are several good realtime applications available to you including ours to start off with and some of the VRML apps are pretty useful. Remember that the biggest part of the skills is application independent and relates more to what you can do as an artist.

Where next?

In my upcoming article I’ll be looking into:

· Blurring the boundary. How will the role of the CGArchitect develops in the future, how is that role defined today. I’ll be asking a few professionals in the area about where they see CGArchitecture going.

· Learning from games. What are the future realtime projects in architecture, and how can we learn from games where realtime projects have been going on for a while.

· Case study. A group of architectural students went from knowing nothing about realtime to re-constructing a part of London.

· Top engines and what they do. Here I’ll look into a couple of the top PC technology engines for realtime and what they have to offer and what is potentially coming up.

· Top hardware and what’s going to be on the horizon in realtime.


The models in the images were made by Bill Sands, Wolfgang Haak, Irena Hrabincova and Kristjan Gardarsson.

Halli is educated as an architect but has worked in game development as artist, and art-director on titles published by Sony, Sega, Microsoft and others. Halli is now focusing on bringing affordable and easy to use real-time technology to architects with Cadai; Hali can be reached via email at halli@cadai.com
 

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