Using 3D Game Engines in Architecture?

Mentor asks: "Recently, a very promising young architect asked me to give her some ideas for a design presentation she has to do concerning a new building in Germany. Instead of making another dull non-interactive flyby-drivethrough 3dmax-movie, I suggested using the Halflife or Quake engine to precreate the whole building, and let visitors of the exhibition experience the building firsthand, being a player in it, and interacting with the building (without any actual weapons of course :)). I was wondering whether this has been done a lot already . Does anyone have any tips?" I would think that most 3D engines have evolved enough where something like this might actually be practical. Thoughts?

Slightly OT but...

[Dr. Bent]

Using game technology for professional applications is a great idea, but not a new one. For example... [radtime.com]

been there done that

[brer_rabbit]

To try my hand at making maps, I built an Action Quake map of my condo/townhouse building. Only problem is whenever I enter the living room now I duck for cover behind the sofa.

Lighting and detail issues

[billcopc]

Lighting models in Half Life or Quake aren't necessarily suited to real-life conditions. You can produce a much more convincing illusion of sunlight in 3dsmax than you could ever dream of faking in those older game engines. That's the key word : fake. Light is a complicated concept, and is what makes the difference between a 5-second quick render and a 15-minute quality render. To achieve decent lighting in real-time, game engines resort to some smart approximations like pre-calculated reflection maps and light-mapping as opposed to true ray tracing.

You will also have trouble showing the great detail of your work with a game engine. With a pre-rendered demonstration, you can focus attention to whatever you like, and can take things out of their context to show them more closely (e.g. breaking apart a dining chair into its individual legs and screws).

In short, it would certainly be a novel way to show your stuff, but not necessary an efficient one. You might want to try rendering multiple camera paths/angles and make it semi-interactive (think Myst), that could allow the client to see in-depth views of what interests them most. Just a thought.

How about "new" engines?

[CTho9305]

I agree that they fake it. But how do newer engines (Unreal2, Max Payne?) do with these kinds of things?

One note about faking: in Unreal Tournament, the editor raytraces the map, so you could most likely get pretty good lighting for static scenes like a building.

Re:How about "new" engines?

[billcopc]

True, pre-tracing is one way to cheat, but what happens when you open a door ? Sunlight won't come through, because the raytraced light is static. If you're demonstrating a house and you're going for realism, you want that light to show, you might even want to be able to open/close window blinds to see if their is sufficient light to work and sufficient darkness to sleep. Wall colors will affect these parameters greatly as well. The sad truth is that without proper radiosity filtering, the end result just doesn't look real enough, and radiosity is too complex to be done in real time, even with today's faster processors it still takes a few seconds per frame, up to minutes depending on scene complexity.

Perhaps the best would be a combination of both a real-time game-engine model of the building, and a pre-rendered scripted video focusing on those details you're trying to sell on.

try blender

[BroadbandBradley]

it allows you to export to many formats (and import if you already have a 3dmodel) and also has a game engine.
http://blender.nl

Classic

[VA Software]

The classic example of this is the Notre Dame [vrndproject.com] cathedral project. It is done using the Unreal engine.

We did it with Q3

[Anthanos]

Our school is in the design process right now on a new science and technology building. The architects used the Q3 engine to model a sample for us as well as providing RealVideo versions.
Checkit out here [plu.edu]

I gotta admit - pretty cool to load a map of a building on campus during those late night LAN parties....

Re:We did it with Q3

[Maul]

I'd love it if someone were to turn some of my school's buildings into Quake maps. It'd also be nice to have models for some of my profs...

[...scenes] Scenery and rendering

[Ninja_Gaiden_III_cut]

Like billcopc said and I'll summarize, a 3D game engine is designed to be fast and its render params produce good-quality results, but it isn't near high-quality, something I like to add into this thread there's related to the Quake III engine:

- It's a proven project
- It's a reference to programmers
- It has wireframe technology with NURBS-like potencialities
- It can be easily modeled according to developers' intentions
- It analizes objects that won't be visible in the rendered scene and it doesn't spend time processing such objects

Some drawbacks:

- Most floating-point operations are done using single-precision format rather double-precision in order to save bandwidth and to increase performance - hey, QIII engine was designed for 3D games then graphics processing is done along other tasks (physics, sound, artificial intelligence, etc. processing)
- 3D models must keep compatibility between QIII engine (developed for games) and the 3D modeler software (developed for CAD)

Quake 1!

[The Evil Beaver]

Heh, a (long) while ago, I remember reading about doing the same thing, but with the Quake 1 engine. Of course, it was probably more of a novelty then than it is now, since most building planning software I know of has a 3D mode.

Anyways, the idea of designing a house or other building as a Quake level is appealing... Especially since it wouldn't be hard to add some weapons here and there for play as an actual Quake level. Mwhahaha.

The computer science building in Cambridge

[xiox]

A bbc article [bbc.co.uk] about using Quake for the computer science building in Cambridge.

Theres also a year old Slashdot article

[rommi]

Which you can find here [slashdot.org].

Unrealty - Unreal engine for architecture

[Vito]

Geez, I'm almost miffed that I had to plug my own project myself.

Yes, things like this have been done before, and even featured on Slashdot [slashdot.org]. That article is about NASA doing a virtual tour of the International Space Station using Unrealty [unrealty.net], which is a stripped-down version of the same Unreal engine used in Unreal Tournament, targeted at architects and real estate developers. Even won an award for a research paper [unrealty.net] I did on the concept.

While it never really caught on, perhaps the next go at, using the next-generation Unreal technologies, will. Structure Studios [structurestudios.com] is one such competitor, using next-generation engines to produce even more realistic representations. And you can check out some of the work of a licensed Unrealty locale developer at 3dx3 [3dx3.com].

Not new, but still interesting

[Chelloveck]

A number of years ago a buddy of mine at Fermilab created a walk-through of the control rooms as a map for Duke Nukem. I don't think he included weapons, but people loved going around smashing computer monitors with the "mighty foot".

No, sorry, I don't know where you can get it...

I DOOMed my house...

[mfarah]

Some years ago, I used DOOM for a model of my house (although some alterations had to be done, since it's two-storey high). It worked fine, and provided for a nice game, but it looked like it was just a quick&dirty prototype. I keep trying to make time available to do it in Quake...

It is very easy to use a Quake map-editor to create a map of a house of a building, but you'll hit the limits of these engines as soon as you try to polish the chromes, so to speak (lightning conditions, proper wall textures, bathrooms, etc.). As a prototype, it's great, but that's pretty much its scope.

Monty Python

[heliocentric]

This reminds me of the the Architects Sketch by John Cleese and Graham Chapman from "Monty Python's Flying Circus", 20 October 1970 (script [serve.com]) where these architects are showing off their design for a rather unusual building... it starts off:

Mr. Wiggin: This is a 12-storey block combining classical neo-Georgian features with the efficiency of modern techniques. The tenants arrive here and are carried along the corridor on a conveyor belt in extreme comfort, past murals depicting Mediterranean scenes, towards the rotating knives. The last twenty feet of the corridor are heavily soundproofed. The blood pours down these chutes and the mangled flesh slurps into these....

CAD App.

[jdevons]

I actually write an Architectural CAD application that uses MesaGL as its 3D rendering engine.

We have looked at using various game systems instead, but nothing so far has compared to the level of detail we get with MesaGL...

Now for non-programmers, MesaGL might be a bit of a problem.