May 26, 2011, 01:02:32 pm
I'm just about to finish the 10th real-time project for clients. This time my client asked me to do the obligatory real-time visualization of his new residential area in France. They use it a lot for presentation to their customers. Due to the nice movie tools within Lumion3D I also delivered them a movie out of this viz plus 10 high-res shots for their marketing activities.
Finally I converted the scene a bit to do a large rendering for a construction site sign in nearly 8000px size which I rendered in Mentalray. For the sign I stick with a modelized theme so people driving or walking by can see at once where the area ended and how it will look like later on.
Technically I'm still not very pleased with the current lighting and especially Speedtree vegetation which Lumion3D uses. It looks like a World of Warcraft world plus has issues with alphamaps from a distant shot and high-res. I have a good catalog of own vegetation assets which I only can import as a model without support of Level of Detail or clipping which results in very high triangel counts. I used my birches and the whole scene has around 4.5 Million Polygones @ 25fps. I hope this will be opened a bit more. For future projects where clients use real-time solutions but don't need a movie I will stick with my previously used real-time engine for better performance. For most purposes Lumion3D is a nice tool. For movies I save a lot of time compared to rendering. But it also depends on what the clients likes to present and what look he is aiming for.
At the moment there is no holy grail for architects and interactive tools. I would have to use CryEngine or whatever to have best of two worlds.
But maybe I'm a bit picky of all the features because I have a game-art background and now what is possible but not available for arch-viz tools up to date.
The movie is still at the post-production guy so it will be some days until I can post it here.
EDIT: Funny the forum software doesn't resize the images.
