Topic: Second attempted with Lumion - Local Golf Course

[ryste3d]

Hi,

First I want say thank you for all your kind help with how the program works...

Here is my second attempt with Lumion. Our local golf course made in a few hours

Just imagine what Lumion could do if we were able to import animations as .mdd files (I think all 3d programs can read and write .mdd files) and you don't have to bother about all kinds of bone systems. Or maybe export camera path so you don' have to do cameratracking. That would be awesome.

[Morten]

The .mdd files made with PointOven require that people purchase this plug-in, so I would personally prefer a more open format for vertex animations, for example, FBX point caches (thanks to Aaron for pointing me in the right direction).

Incidentally, Artur will be looking at how feasible it would be to import the FBX point cache format in the future. Just bear in mind that this is no guarantee that it can or will be implemented, but it sure would be awesome if he succeeds!

[Ming Architect]

Impressive work!

May I ask how much time it take for this animation rendering?
I want to get the feel when compare to cpu rendering on this project type. Look like Lumion can really shine for large landscape scene.

Thanks,
Ming

[ryste3d]

I did the animation to see how far I could go with the amount of trees in the scene. I even had F9 "ON" the hole time I was building the landscape. I gave up before Lumion did. Impressing.

Render was between 10 and 14 sec/frame. VERY IMPRESSING


And yes Morten, you are absolutely right FBX point caches would be better. When we are working with vertex animation I believe everything is possible.

[cbcarch]

Looks very good.

A couple of questions:

1. How did you populate the model with all of those trees?
2. How large ( Acres/sq miles/meters, etc. ) is the site, and how did Lumion handle it?
3. How did you do the grading/topography?

cheers

[RAD]

All about that Aerial!

The camera is the golf ball...clever indeed.

[peterm]

Render was between 10 and 14 sec/frame. VERY IMPRESSING

Along with the other questions, what Star setting did you use for the render, and what's your basic PC specs?

I guess the buildings are all minimum type objects so its really all about the trees and scale of scene.

Thanks for sharing.

[mk1978]

Looks really nice!

I would also like ask a couple of questions because I have been trying to model/animate our local golf course. Actually, I abandoned Unity because of some shortcomings. Now I have created the model/animation in Unity 3D game engine, but your animation looks much better.

- Did you model the golf course model in some other software and import it into Lumion?
- How did you get the grass texture to blend so nicely? Or, did you use large top-down image and projected that into the model?
- How many trees you have in the model and how did you place them? In my Unity 3D model I have about 30 000 trees and I was able to place the automatically in few minutes.

Thanks,
Miikka

[blendman]

This was well designed indeed.  I can see a lot eye for detail, other than large canvass scene and planting lots of trees, it was well conceived. 

The camera - 3rd peron view is clever indeed.  I think you could tell a (w)hole story around this. 

Many thanks for sharing.

Regards,

blendman

[Remko]

We already use MDD internally to make all the characters and the flags for example. I can take a look if we can add it to the animation pack or somthing. I'm not sure if it's even possible bacause it does have it's limitations but in general I think more animation functions are nice.

You can already import rigid animations in the Ultimate version by the way! I think we need to add some more controls for it for syncing and triggering. Right now it's intended for looping animations.

[ryste3d]

First I added Geo-location in SketchUp - but to make such a large terrain I needed to "Add More Imagery" about 10 times with different location. The model is 18 km x 5 km.

Because the texture maps from Google is very Low res (and it was winter) I had to get a orthographic high res photo from the location (golf course) elsewhere.

Here in Norway you can find them in the yellow pages - type an address and you get a map of the location. Zoom all the way in so you get a nice crisp image with as many details as possible.

Then you do a "Print screen" Now In Photoshop press "New" and "Past"

Back in the yellow pages you drag to another location overlapping the first image you already have I Photoshop. "Print screen" "New" and "Past"  After you have done this for all the location you need you
can start to put them together in Photoshop making one big orthographic image.

If the roads is still washed out when you zoom in on the image simply draw a new crisp road in another layer in Photoshop. Or maby add som text.

Back in you favorite 3d program map your orthographic image to the terrain model you made I Sketchup. But only at the location where it has to be high res.

I use Lightwave to do this, but you could properly do it in SketchUp.

This seams like much work - but I did it in about an hour.


Because this was a very big model SketchUp crashed trying exporting to FBX format but no problem with the COLLADA file format.


I placed all the trees one by one. No bigy - the shadows from the image/ground showed me exactly where to put them.

It was absolutely no problem for Lumion to handle all this. I had F9 on the hole time I was building the site.


PC setup

Vista Ultimate i7 CPU 950 @ 3.07GHz . 64-bit.

12GB RAM

GeForce GTX 285

[ryste3d]

Remko, That would be awesome.

[mk1978]

ryste3d, thanks for sharing your work flow/ideas!

Now I am again one step closer to purchase Lumion 3D.

[Remko]

Excellent artdirection by the way. I love the look of the clouds and I also like the colorization combined with the tilt shift effect caused by depth of field.