Realtime Residential Visualization

Thanks once again for the information. It's only because I have recently started some basic tests with Unreal Ed that I was keen to know the difference. I do agree that the purchasing fees of these two engines are high. Leadwerks 2, I will give a look into it.

Thanks Inxa. Nice to see people here like game-art too. :) Cry and Unreal are more polished in details and offer a complete package of course to the sake of a high licensing fees or royalties over a certain income. This has to be taken in account if you want to compare those engines. Leadwerks 2 offers no AA so rendering the screenshots to double size and resizing back then is neccesary but works. Camera paths could be more flexible like Cry which worked a bit like trackview in 3dmax. Cry and I guess Unreal both come with a more advanced shader package for vegetation or SSS. On the other hand leadwerks has all important features in it's editor at hand, a strong renderer and offers .lua scripting which enables the user to place own scripts like character animations, additional features and whatever can be done with LUA to the pack. Coders like the flexibility. I like the support which is just a mail to the developer away and I never feel of beeing customer No.8675933 to him. Leadwerks Engine 3.0 is now in development which fixes a lot of critical stuff and maybe there will be a Arch-Viz branch too but I still have to take a look what architects or their artists need most.

Very very nice. Great detailed explanation. The Gdc work on the website is fantastic. How different is it than working in Engines like Unreal or Cry.

Thank you very much. A very comprehensive and clear explanation. Willha e a. lser look now at the engine. phil

Hey Philip, no it's not difficult but not as easy like other recently released real-time tools want to make everyone believe. Basicall the workflow is the following: 1. Get the floorplans - in this case the land layout - as a .dwg plus some .pdf files with drawings on it plus all the requirements. For this project the client want to sell land not the buildings so the house design was secondary. 2. Modeling all the needed assets based on the .dwg and requirements. Sidewalks, parking lots, little walls, hedges and so on. I also used some asset packs from the internet to optimize production time. I had a lot of vegetation in my library. Most stuff is available for sale on my own little shop (http://shop.pure3d.de). 3. Unwrapping as needed (from simple cubic unwraps to detailed ones with very few seams only) and texturing of course. Textures are like in game-design from 512px to 2048px with a simple diffuse, specular, normalmap and sometimes opacy setup. 4. Then doing the work in Leadwerks editor. I set up the pic of the residantial layout on my terrain and placed the buildings, painted the vegetation on it imported the exported meshes from 3dsmax with the Leadwerks editor which exports to .gmf format (up to 64.000 triangles per model). 5. Then last thing is lighting setup, camera paths and rendering the screenshots / movie frames for further editing. That's basically is it. It can't be done in 5minutes like other tools claim because modeling still has to be done still by the artist. Plus knowledge how game-engines work is needed. Sometimes it's better to do sets of small models and stick them together in the tool. In other cases it's better to do large chunks of models bake lighting to support realtime defered lighting and so on. I put a lot of research and knowledge into my services and as you can see my portfolio is very wide spread from 16 sqare kilometers simulations to this 500 meters village or a solar parc with over 6500 individual panels. Another good thing which I will use for the next project is a universal setup. So I can export to Leadwerks but also click the render button in Maxwell or Octane to do a classical rendering with minor additional effort. Finally clients get the project files with my "Viz-Tool" a presentation tool for interactive demonstration. It's like a mini-game with the visualization as a level. Check the download there for a sample: http://pure3d.de/english-version/realtime-viz-leadwerks-gdc2010-pure3d.html This is accepted well because the client can do basic screenshots on his own if he likes or just show of the project to his clients if he is a decision maker. My solarparc client used the interactive stuff a lot for community presentations or gouvernment negotiations. Doing the Viz-app was the only coding which is involved in my projects. I have a programmer for this task which does stuff from time to time. A big plus are the costs. Maybe it doesn't look as good like Vray or Maxwell but I reach companies which don't want to spent a huge amount of money for rendered movies but demand solid quality. It depends on you if you pass the smaller production costs to the client or not. I usually do it. Speaking of costs - Leadwerks costs money only one time. No additional annual costs, royalties or whatever. This project was done in around 80-90 hours of work in total so using Leadwerks (which is very efficent) and real-time in general as an efficient workflow tool is a big plus. But it will not replace the artist or rendered pictures. But it's a nice addition!

Hey Philip, no it's not difficult but not as easy like other recently released real-time tools want to make everyone believe. Basicall the workflow is the following: 1. Get the floorplans - in this case the land layout - as a .dwg plus some .pdf files with drawings on it plus all the requirements. For this project the client want to sell land not the buildings so the house design was secondary. 2. Modeling all the needed assets based on the .dwg and requirements. Sidewalks, parking lots, little walls, hedges and so on. I also used some asset packs from the internet to optimize production time. I had a lot of vegetation in my library. Most stuff is available for sale on my own little shop (http://shop.pure3d.de). 3. Unwrapping as needed (from simple cubic unwraps to detailed ones with very few seams only) and texturing of course. Textures are like in game-design from 512px to 2048px with a simple diffuse, specular, normalmap and sometimes opacy setup. 4. Then doing the work in Leadwerks editor. I set up the pic of the residantial layout on my terrain and placed the buildings, painted the vegetation on it imported the exported meshes from 3dsmax with the Leadwerks editor which exports to .gmf format (up to 64.000 triangles per model). 5. Then last thing is lighting setup, camera paths and rendering the screenshots / movie frames for further editing. That's basically is it. It can't be done in 5minutes like other tools claim because modeling still has to be done still by the artist. Plus knowledge how game-engines work is needed. Sometimes it's better to do sets of small models and stick them together in the tool. In other cases it's better to do large chunks of models bake lighting to support realtime defered lighting and so on. I put a lot of research and knowledge into my services and as you can see my portfolio is very wide spread from 16 sqare kilometers simulations to this 500 meters village or a solar parc with over 6500 individual panels. Another good thing which I will use for the next project is a universal setup. So I can export to Leadwerks but also click the render button in Maxwell or Octane to do a classical rendering with minor additional effort. Finally clients get the project files with my "Viz-Tool" a presentation tool for interactive demonstration. It's like a mini-game with the visualization as a level. Check the download there for a sample: http://pure3d.de/english-version/realtime-viz-leadwerks-gdc2010-pure3d.html This is accepted well because the client can do basic screenshots on his own if he likes or just show of the project to his clients if he is a decision maker. My solarparc client used the interactive stuff a lot for community presentations or gouvernment negotiations. Doing the Viz-app was the only coding which is involved in my projects. I have a programmer for this task which does stuff from time to time. A big plus are the costs. Maybe it doesn't look as good like Vray or Maxwell but I reach companies which don't want to spent a huge amount of money for rendered movies but demand solid quality. It depends on you if you pass the smaller production costs to the client or not. I usually do it. Speaking of costs - Leadwerks costs money only one time. No additional annual costs, royalties or whatever. This project was done in around 80-90 hours of work in total so using Leadwerks (which is very efficent) and real-time in general as an efficient workflow tool is a big plus. But it will not replace the artist or rendered pictures. But it's a nice addition!

Well done very nice clean renders. The price of the leadwerk Engine is $199...seems very reasonable. Can I ask what was the work flow like , and is it a complex option for realtime. Is there programming required ? I presume it's not as simple as import with textures or is it. Would be very interested in your feedback please. Thank you phil