jvlive

Forgot where i heard this:

"... to stay put, you must run fast..."

Im panting.

Thanks for the heads up, Mihai.

__________________
the early bird gets the worm, but hey, the late worm missed the bird.

vizfx

I know many people are a bit confused about Flash (swf) and Shockwave (dcr + w3d). They are two separate standards swf developed with Adobe Flash (or similar products) and Shockwave developed with Adobe Director. Flash is only capable of showing pre-rendered 3D graphics (stills and movies) with no 3D real time capabilities just a smart assembling and composition line (similar to 2D composition software) which is a fake 3D environment but Shockwave has 3D real time capabilities and can incorporate flash elements making them even more powerful (vice versa is not possible). So Director has a much versatile assembling line compared to Flash but known until 2001 just for offline media. (http://www.adobe.com/products/direct...s/integration/, http://www.adobe.com/products/direct...omparison.html, http://www.adobe.com/products/shockwaveplayer/)
The biggest advantage of the Shockwave compared with the rest of the 3D web is the community, at this moment 390 million Web users and still rising. Even so their is enough space for open source project because the request for 3D web is extremely high and it is increasing.
Mihai

SunGlare

Wow, this shockwave works fast, did anybody tried to put some archviz space into it?

The other child:

What about millions of PDF Acrobat Readers installed around the world(I don't know the numbers, but I don't know person with email account who didn't know what is that)
They'd put a lot of efforts to make it new JPEG of 3d documents, with RightHemisphere and IBM I think.

Personally I don't fell that You can compare anything with baked shadows and rendered glow to simple 3d space in Adobe Acrobat 7.0, but it is very light, and you don't need a plugin.

I was playing with capabilities of it, for a moment in my friends' office, and I have produced very simple 3d of the design hat I was working with other architect.

It helped us to find the problems with the design itself, and decide how to show it on the rendering.

The file was only 400kb(!).

But there is a problem with file format, adobe accepts only u3d file format, so I needed to ask my friend for several file convert favors. He got in his office some RightHemisphere product to convert files from catia to other and back, so its a bit of the problem now.

Heres the file.
Print and export is blocked.
I believe that You can design more complicated menus and controls for it but I could find any product of adobe that would allow to do that, at least they don't explain it clearly which one does. But on the adobe website there are lot of nice examples of UI in 3d PDF files.

Attached Files

Hotel Lobby_pass.pdf (401.6 KB, 61 views)

vizfx

Hi again
Some other VR products from EON-reality (http://www.eonreality.com) kept my attention.
They are quite expensive but offer a large and varied range of professional solutions from software to input and output devices for VR. The software is impressive and requires no programming for most of the features. It has powerful real time photo realistic rendering, advanced physics engine, realistic human behaviors and a good connection with 3D software. Another impressive feature is the 3DS Max exporter and viewer Raptor http://www.eonreality.com/raptor which is free and you can create with it basic interaction, for further development you`ll need EON Professional.
Even more impressive are the output http://www.eonreality.com/products/e...y_systems.html and input devices. Some of them are looking as they were extracted from “Minority Report”. At http://www.eonreality.com/eon-products.html you can see some demo videos in the same time there are some interesting case studies and demos on the site.
At this moment I`m working on two VR projects and I`ll keep you informed on the progress. One is an online VR city (a VR web portal) and another one offline with a medieval fortress – virtual reconstruction.
Best regards.
Mihai

vizwhiz

Mihai

Thanks for all of This information

evidently The stand-alone viewer is now moved To another page

for FREE download, at:

http://www.eonreality.com/support/eon-downloads.html

**

Thanks

Randy

MegaPixel

Thank you for consolidating all of this research into one post - A great reference!

I think the Adobe 3D format is promising, but it's still very buggy at the moment. You need to be fairly script savy to do animation work with it but because pdf viewing is about as common as flash viewing, if Adobe cleans it up sooner then later, it will become a defacto standard for 3D content sharing.

As far as virtual experiences go, I very strongly feel that the gaming industry needs to get involved to really catalyze the visualization industry. Gaming engines like Valves Source, if striped clean and reinterfaced for virtual friendly navigation, could really spark entheusiasm for all the nay sayers.

nmhblah

Hello

This is my first post so please be kind!

I am interested in the real time developments and I think we could implement it without to many problems at work. We use Archicad and it seems to be the best at transferring models into other packages to produce VR and stuff like that. We try and model as much as possible for our own benefit without going over the top and making a massive model. Seeing we go so far i think it would be logical to produce a realtime simulation which people who find plans hard to read can understand and navigate their way around the whole building.

I have used Macromedia Director not so long ago for a trial and I like the drag and drop method of creating the controls for navigating the simulation.

Before taking the plunge with Director, I would be interested for your views as to the other softwares which would be suited to an architectural practice. I have followed some of the links to sites mentioned before and they seem to be more for computer game development. Any info for suitable sites would be good

I hope my first post is considered worthy of a reply from someone - I will keep tabs on the forum and improve if needs be!!!!!!!

Thanks folks

vizfx

Hi again
The good news is that the interest in this domain is increasing and recently I saw even an architectural visualization test with Cryengine which is one of the most powerful game engines available. You can see the architectural demos at: http://digitalurban.blogspot.com/sea...Game%20Engines.
This game engine and some others like Unreal are capable of even a lot more. Just take a look at Crysis for some amazing real time 3D images and videos. You can find them easily on www.gamespot.com or on www.youtube.com.
About Director (Shockwave) from Adobe it seems that this year is going to be a major one with a new release. “Adobe plans to make Director the preferred environment for games creation and to increase the use of Shockwave Player on computers, consoles, and mobile devices.” (adobe.com)
The actual version which is three years old has some limitations but still is the preferred tool for many multimedia studios.
Some things about Director:
- requires a bit of programming skills depending on the level of interactivity,
- at this version is only limited toDirectX7 (similar possibilities in OpenGL)
- a good addition is the Chrome Library plugin (even the free version)
- you can use external resources (files) even online with streaming techniques
- can integrate various type of media (images, audio, video, flash, 3d, etc.)
I`ve posted another thread on VR forum about a 3D web portal which is going to be updated soon http://www.cgarchitect.com/vb/21902-...eb-portal.html. The site is made with Shockwave and is a work in progress for the moment.
Best regards.
Mihai

Clausbang

Hi Vizfx

You are on an enormous task. Thought I'd give my 2 cents.

In addition to the ones you have mentioned I have these on my list:

TurnTool
Viewpoint
Anark
N.grain
Mindavenue
Walkinside
Navisworks
Micronet
O2C
Octaga
VB2S
MyVR
Discovery viewer

- and thats just the top of the list. There are literally hundreds of engines out there, with most of them requirering quite good programming skills.

What you need to be aware of is that a lot of the technologies will not handle enough geometry and texture (light-info) for it to be usefull in archviz or it will be so difficult to set up for each scene that it simply doesn't make sense to use for real work.

/Claus

DavidR

watching thread