Wolf

Being an old Lightscape fan,
i missed the realtime viewing of Architectural models,
so i have been working on an engine that takes baked Gi
models made in max and lets you fly around in realtime. I used Vray
which took a few hours to render the lightmaps,
getting some nice results, around 60 fps on a geforce 6
with 8x aa and 8x filtering. screenshots below, will post a demo soon.

Model is of a synagogue that Louis Kahn never got around to building

nicnic

sounds great, i have always been interested in realtime stuff but iv allways felt the effort outweighed the benefit.

Id be very interested in seeing some more info!

Wolf

Ease of use was my main interest, having played with a few realtime tools and game engines, i didnt want it to be complicated to get the model into the engine, or to have to learn an editor. The process is to bake the lightmaps, name your objects based on how you want them to be shown in the engine, and then export to the viewer. I have also included a special naming convention for Level of Detail to make larger scenes.

nicnic

I think you are right there. Quest 3D,Turntool etc all seem very involved for what is basically navigating around a static well finished model.

DavidR

watching thread (why isn't there an option for this?)

Wolf

heres a scene im working on. Texture crawl is notorious in rt engines, especially with high res maps, theres a 2k map on this model
so i tried using lower level of detail maps for further away objects,
it worked quite well, and would be the optimal way to do this,
but in the end i found that using the graphics cards anisotropic filtering
looks pretty good at a slight cost to fps.

Jeff Mottle

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Jeff Mottle
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angroni

I'm currently using EON Studio in my school.
Its just import in the model and voila.... ^^
any comment about EON?

only3d

looks real nice! im on the look-out for a nice & easy VR engine so i'll b looking forward to this.

and dear old kahn is one of my favourites too!

good work

oluv

both examples look very nice, free of any baking-artifacts. may i ask if you rendered complete-maps or only lightmaps with multitextured seperate diffuse maps?

what gi-method did you use for baking in vray and what are your settings? i am always getting artifacts, especially if surfaces are overlapping. i cannot find the right settings when baking with vray. i attached you an example, where i tried to bake the same scene with vray and with radiosity. radiosity shows less artifacts and better subtle details in shadow/light areas.

another problem i am always having is inside/outside lighting. either it is too dark inside or too bright outside. so most of the time i must divide my model into a separate inside-area, and an outside area and bake both maps with different exposures. with big models this is quite exhausting. i would hope for a better and simpler method. would like to know how you deal with this.

best regards,

olaf

ps. the final baked model can be found in this posting btw: http://www.cgarchitect.com/vb/20816-...t-3d-test.html

Attached Images

lightmap.jpg (67.6 KB, 156 views)