First Visualization Demo!!!

Fellow Unity users,

Feel free to check out my work in regards to architectural simulation.

http:www.pixelmojo.com/UnityDownloads/TownCenterFinal1.zip


I am attaching 2 screenies from within the sim. Please take into account the simulation is fairly large and uses lots of VRAM. So make sure you have a fairly powerful machine, to run it optimally. The simulation is a first demo for the retail development industry.

It was developed on a MacBookPro(gen1) and a Quad PowerMac, using Maya and Modo.

Thanks for viewing and feel free to leave comments.

Cheers,

Gary

 

Great job , nice texturing. What 3D app are you using.

Norby

 

Norby,

Thanks Norby! I am using Maya and Modo, Vue 6 for the sky + environment reflectionmaps, and of course Photoshop.

Cheers,

Gary

 

I like the way you did the shadows ,i guess you have
used a separate shadow map for this. must be very big

Norby

 

Shadows are separate light maps added using the lightmap with diffuse material. This way I can texture the model using shared materials and still get lightmapping into the runtime. The shadow maps are not that big. I use lower res versions then what I rendered out. Lots of them but low res.

If you don't mind me asking what did you run the sim. on? What specs? How did it perform?

Thanks again for peeking.

Gary

 

Hi Gary

I use a Dual 2.7 Ghz PowerPC G5 with 1 GB DDR SDram.
with a GeForce 6800 Ultra
and i have set your app to 1920 * 1200 and checked Fantastic.
So i have used the maximum settings. When rotating it seems to be
a bit slow, but not irritating. i tried other settings from 1024*640 to 1600 *1200 this with the same results. maybe texture size issue?

Cheers

Norby

 

Hi Gary,

Looks good, especially the texturing and lightmaps. Pretty cool to see a strip mall that will be using windmills (for supplementary electricity?).

Ran it on my Intel Core Duo iMac at max resolution, good quality and it ran pretty nicely. A little jumpy at times, I'm guessing it's running at 12 - 30 fps. Didn't try it at lower res or quality, but I'd bet it would run very smoothly if I had.

Great work!

 

Thanks Guys. On my MacBookPro 20ish fps when at highest settings with everyhting in view. I appreciate the feedback.

BTW a BIG thanks to everyone who has been helping me with scripting.

Cheers,

Gary

 

very nice gary (nice site too btw ; )

runs somewhere around 15fps on an intel imac @ 1680 - fantastic.

 

Dr. Jones,

Thanks for the info. and thanks for your help along the way.

Cheers,

Gary

 

Very pretty, nice work...

MacBook Pro 2.33GHz
256MB VRAM

At 1024x768 on Fantastic it seemed a wee bit jittery at certain times (mostly when walking and turning, not so much in straight line motion). Same size but using the Good setting it ran quite nicely.

 

Mr. Product Evangelist thanks for taking a look.

I think the biggest problem with the jitteriness at times is when i started this project I did not understand the combining of meshes and sharing materials as much as I do now. That being said I have done my best to go back and optimize things, including using meshcombine, etc.

Next project will definitely run much smoother.

BTW, I have nearly the same setup and I noticed after a fresh boot the sim runs much smoother.

Thanks again,

Gary

 

G5 2.5GHz + X800 here, probably about 10fps with everything in view, 20-30fps otherwise. Different graphics settings don't seem to make much difference (640x480/Fastest isn't really noticeably faster than 1600x1200/Fantastic), which suggests to me that the limitation is the number of objects. If you've already combined what you can, then probably there's not much you can do about that. At least the Intel Macs are less affected by the "lots o' objects" slowdown for whatever reason.

Very nice looking indeed, in any case. I did encounter some sort of wackyness with the zooming in/out controls...if I stuck with either the keyboard or the gamepad, it worked fine, but switching from one to another caused it to behave in odd ways or not work at all.

--Eric

 

You mention you used Modo. What exactly did you do in Modo and what did you do in Maya.

Did you export anything directly from Modo into Unity or did you have to use Maya for that.

The reason I'm asking is because I'm needing to do a similar project but with just Modo and Unity. Do you think this could be done?. In my initial tests, getting models out of Modo into Unity is hit or miss at best.

Looks great BTW.

 

Modo to Maya to Unity is my path. Hopefully there will bedirect path from Modo to Unity.

Thanks everyone for your feedback. Have a great weekend you Unit-arians!

Cheers,

Gary

 

Looks good, plays like S***e on my PBG4 though, but that's expected. Bump the shadow contrast up some more... this scene is blase right now without some sort of lighting perspective... it's noon in middle America and my mom just bought a nifty trinket in one of your outlet shops. If you're going for generic Americana then well done, but bump it up a notch if you're going for something else. On a technical note I'd take some cars out of the parking lot since they just slow it down and add nothing. Same goes for the people, they look very strange from a distance and when you get close to them they're just cartoon outlines... adds nothing to the scene. Just giving honest feedback... this is a well done professional scene and it just needs a few tweaks.

 

I don't think they're there for artistic reasons...technically, they add scale that you can directly relate to. Architectural visualization stuff often has people in it for that reason. Although I do wonder about the "cartoon" look.

Also it would be kind of cool if the people could walk around...and then one of them could break into one of the stores and hold it up, and then you'd press "1" to select your pistol and go after him, engaging in a shootout while dodging around the cars, one of which would go up in a big explosion for no particular reason, so you'd press "6" to whip out your rocket launcher and...uh...sorry, got carried away there.

--Eric

 

Antenna and Eric,

The peeps are there for scale. As for the blandness of the architectural design. This is made for the retail industry here in the states and this what they are curretnly building in most towns/suburbs. Is it fancy or nice, no, not really. But that is the state of such types of build outs.

People and cars are there for scale. In my former life before becoming an animator and 3d designer I was an Architect. They aren't realistic on purpose. although I agree they look strange from a distance. They are fully textured though(just not in this sim.). I have mocap and animaiton sequences for characters within my scenes. The next demo will show people moving and fully textured. Just an experiment for this demo

I really, really appreciate everyone's feedback and opinions. Thank you all so very much.

Have a wonderful weekend Unit-arians.

Cheers,

Gary

 

Joachim,

Thanks. Now with that pipeline of fbx will the textures 'stick'/go with the model? Or will I need to re-texture/add new materials in Unity? Just wondering I haven't tried it yet...

Cheers,

Gary

 

I keep hearing this but i have spent many hours with both lightwave and Modo exporting to FBX but I ALWAYS have to cross my fingers and hope that things will come in properly.

I'd like to know if anyone in the forums are actually using FBX files as their path to Unity. Anyone?

I'm betting garyhaus includes Maya because he understands the hit or miss nature of the FBX approach.

 

That is the truth. I haven't had total consistency with different ways of doing it.

 

Yes the texture assign automatically with no problems. This isn't the issue. The issue is the UVs or often jacked up without any reason as to why. I've never been able to find out why one UV will come in perfectly while another will be completely crazy. Even though both UVs are very similar. On a complex scene forget about it.

I love unity but I'm desperately trying to get a workflow that works so i can actually do something cool with it. ...and unfortunately, Maya, Blender, And C4d are not options.

My apologies for Hijacking the thread. Gary your sim is very nice. Hopefully mine will be moving forward soon as well.

 

Maya is definitley the most seamless 3D app to use with Unity, but like Joe said it still goes through the FBX export process and things can still screw up if a texture isn't assigned to a UV set. This is especially true when doing multi-UV stuff such as lightmaps. I'm finishing up a lightmapping tutorial tonight for the Unity mag and I'm trying to be as verbose as possible just so people won't fall into any of these traps.

And back to Gary's project, I came across too harsh... it really looks fantastic. I still think the shadows should be more prominent though if you're going to take the time to use them. My problem was that it ran at about 5 frames a second on my machine and I think this is because of all the people and cars are each separate objects. This scene shouldn't run this slow (I had it at 640x480 on the lowest setting). Either there's too many objects or the textures are too big.

As a side note I'm really curious why these architectural visualizations assume that we're using a game pad? ZeroFractal does the same thing... why isn't a mouse/keyboard interface preferred? It just seems weird.

 

good question.... I've wondered this as well.

 

I assume that we are not the primary audience for the visualizations, and that when the actual clients view them, they're probably using a gamepad. (Possibly gamepads are more "familiar" because of gaming consoles, or it's just easier to hand a gamepad around rather than crowding around the keyboard, especially if you're using a laptop.) Still, Gary made keyboard/mouse controls for everything and has a help screen for them along with the gamepad, so it doesn't seem like the gamepad is "preferred"; it's just another option. It's always good to support different input methods, even if you wouldn't use them yourself.

--Eric

 

I have both implemented. The clients who will be utilizing these things cannot navigate with a mouse. So I have both, but I prefer the mouse/keyboard myself. I am also implementing Wiimote/nunchuk support this coming week. This will be even easier for most people to use in demonstration situations.

As for performance issues I was just curious. While I feel this first project a success, I learned an awful lot and will have much better performance on the next one.

Nearly all my clients, if not all, will have the hardware/software configured and delivered for them. In other words we provide a turnkey solution, so there is little to minmal effort for the client to get up and running. Of course it all depends on the client and job, but we will control the final solution, as much as possible, to guarantee an acceptable performance level for each simulation(s).

Thanks for the critiques as well. There is always room for improvement and the current project I am working on already looks better.

Thanks again,

Gary

 

I've tested on my mac pro (Dual xeon 2.66) and run perfectly.
By the way,
May I ask you, how much this kind of project cost?
I trying to do similar work here in Peru, and I'll appreciate any info about it.
Thank you!
Gabriel Sado.

 

Nice,

I love how you have got all those different cars and it's not just 1 or 2 diferrent models!

And i love the pond!

Stu

 

Gabriel

Thanks for the additional comments. As for the cost... Its hard to say. We charge by the hour. This project, including architectural design, script dev., modeling, texturing, lighting was about 4 weeks part time. So from there you could extrapolate your hourly rate to get an approximate cost for your client.

Stu_da_Moo - Glad you liked it

Cheers,

Gary