Realtime Archviz BGE

Hi Folks Remember me ? I posted a while back with a couple of deathmatch game levels in BGE?

Anyway, I’ve been working in the Archviz sector since, showing potential customers how their new conservatory will look on their home, using Revit to model and 3dsmax / mentalray for rendering. But with the emerging possibility of using a game engine for archviz, I’ve been wondering if I could create a realtime archviz, of a similar quality with BGE. Allowing potential customers to ‘walkaround’ their conservatory in 3d and also open doors, change materials.

This is a video of a test scene I created, including all the different types of Conservatories and Sunrooms we do, running in BGE, also I’m using Martin Hedin’s day / night cycle for lighting. Massive credit due there, it’s amazing, although my clouds disappear depending on view angle, not sure why yet.

Also working on migrating the massive material and furniture library from max to blender, which is going well, roof tiles in blender with normal mapping look even better than equivalent materials with displacement in 3dsmax ! Glass has to a refmap, and not realtime reflections, but I can work with that. Another problem I’ve had is when importing the FBX the model does not come in with smoothing intact ? All faces seem to come in a same smoothing group so everything looks rounded even where there should be hard edges.

Anyway feel free to comment or critique, it’s still in early stages, but I’m hoping to get visual quality close to Unreal Engine (boo!) and have a much faster workflow due to importing the whole scene in one go and no need for lightmap uv channels.

Here’s the link - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svL4PBm6WOA

Attachments


Looks great,nice work…keep up,man!
Yes ,Blender needs smooting groups.

Thanks Bishop, lot’s of work still to do bringing all of the content from my 3dsmax archviz template, but looks like it’s gonna be worth it. As a first step I’ve migrated all our trees and bushes. Here’s another quick video showing the tress, again using MartinSH daylight cycle, ideal for testing models and materials.

Next up migrating our massive texture / material library … better put the kettle on



wow nice… can i see the logic how to controll that time cycles?

Me again ! Just took a quick video showing those roof tiles I was talking about, although they’re not actually displaced 3d, as they were in 3dsmax / mentalray, the normal mapping makes them look 3d enough for our purposes. Same will apply to rest of our materials roughcast brick etc. Should end up looking as good as our mentalray renders ! Did I really say that ?

Let me know what you think, the rest of our materials will probably use a similar set-up, diffuse, normal spec etc


Consider using variance shadows so they aren’t so ‘sharp.’ It doesn’t support semi-transparent object, so you may have to turn off shadow casting for the window material.

Consider adding reflections to the windows (and anything shiny) using a static cubemap. Houses don’t tend to move, so simply baking either a cubemap or spheremap should be fine. Cubemap gives more realistic results, spheremap is easier to set up. (simply map it to the face normal)

The clouds dissappearing is likely a z-sort error. Try changing their alpha type to something different (ie z-trans to raytrace or visa-versa).

Looking pretty good.

Thanks sdfgeoff, I tried out variance shadows on the sunlamp, very nice, gets rid of any jaggies due to shadowmap resolution. Sometimes I don’t mind the sharp shadows though, gives us some really nice ground tree shadows for example. Prob just as nice with variance too.

I do have a spherical refmap on the glass, not properly set up yet, would prob be better with a cube map. I also have shadow casting turned off for the glass, we don’t really need light filtering unless we used patterned or coloured glass or something.

The clouds problem is weird, changing transparency type has no effect, I think it’s because I’ve deleted Martin Hedmans clouds and used my own clouds sphere and Martins daylight script/logic is not recognising the new clouds sphere. Hmmm will need to look into

Anyway thanks man, good info !

Hi Folks, couple of updates on our Archviz template, including working doors and our materials and furniture library -

Materials - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqirIRmmojE

Doors - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvkMyO7syKk
Attachment 425894
Furniture - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYhkMIg9Jc0
Attachment 425895

Also fixed clouds sphere so it doesn’t disappear in-game and added dynamic lights (can be turned on / off in game)

So far so good ! Hard to tell if this could rival Unreal Engine on graphical / lighting quality just yet, but the workflow from Revit to Blender is workable and fast using Revit to Lumion Bridge. Model comes in untextured, but UVs and smoothing come in perfect. Only bad side is objects are not ‘combined by material’ so I have to join up meshes in blender, but then it’s ready to go.

Nearly at the stage now where we can try it out on a live job, Oooo ! exciting

Hi Folks, couple of updates on our Archviz template, including working doors and our materials and furniture library -


Materials

Furniture - www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYhkMIg9Jc0


Doors - www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvkMyO7syKk


Also fixed clouds sphere so it doesn’t disappear in-game and added dynamic lights (can be turned on / off in game)
So far so good ! Hard to tell if this could rival Unreal Engine on graphical / lighting quality just yet, but the workflow from Revit to Blender is workable and fast using Revit to Lumion Bridge. Model comes in untextured, but UVs and smoothing come in perfect. Only bad side is objects are not ‘combined by material’ so I have to join up meshes in blender, but then it’s ready to go.

Nearly at the stage now where we can try it out on a live job, Oooo ! exciting

Thought I’d try what we have so far out on an existing customers house and conservatory, see how it goes with workflow etc

We now have the latest Revit and Revit to Lumion Bridge, which is working much better. The DAE from Revit now imports perfectly into Blender, all objects are combined by material, smoothing is intact, and it even optimises the Revit geometry so it’s a bit more lightweight and suitable for realtime.


Interior verison with working interior lights ! Yeaha !