First Person realtime Architectural walkthrough

[MGDESIGN]

Hi there !
So.. it's my first post and I usually come here to read, but I would like (we would like, here at MgDesign) share our works with you.

It's a demonstration of our render engine featuring a conversion of VRay lighting. You can download it here :
http://www.rtgu3d.com/index.php?x=4

The deal with this work is that we've made a place big enough to be interesting in terms of graphical representation, and in developpement, to reproduce the lighting conditions of it! (Exterior and interior lightning and basic VRay shaders).

This was made with 3dsmax for the meshes and VRay for the illumination process, then "converted" for our render engine RTGU (Real Time Graphics Utilities).

I hope you'll enjoy using the demo and playing with it. There's a navigation menu at the bottom right of the screen to have more points of view and some animated cameras.

Here are some snapshots from the demo :

Any comments are welcome

Deny

[MegaPixel]

This looks very interesting. With all of the quote on quote "Real Time" products that are floating around these days, hardly any of them allow you to create a stand alone file to let the Client experience the visual at their own pace in "Real Time". Thanks for sharing

[add101]

Looks good. Lots of new Realtime software coming out recently. I'm keen to see how the interface works. Having V-Ray and texture baking in the pipeline is great.
A program with simple and streamlined way to take rendered scenes from max/vray to a realtime product would be great.
Is the baking process automated? I look forward to seeing the software.

[MegaPixel]

I just downloaded the Hotel Demo. It looked and navigated great. My next question is... How Much? Is this still a work in progress or are these tools available to the community yet? Very promising.

[Sawyer]

Tried to dl the demo.exe when it started it crashed

[Erik de Graaf]

Was curious to see this in action. First thing that happened was that i got a pop up stating that my vid card doesn't have enough memory. I still am on an old quadro with 256 meg, it needs 512 to work.
A lot of clients still have onboard video or cheap graphics cards, so they still won't be able to use this.

On another machine holding a Nvidia 260 GTX i got this:

Graphic card model:
Minimum configuration desired: ATI Radeon HD2600 / NVIDIA GeForce 8600
Computer configuration: Microsoft Corporation GDI Generic OpenGL 11

Where the last line is in red.

If clients get this on their screen they will not use the product. Most of my clients can't even install the simplest of software on their pc (either not allowed or not capable themselves). For something like this to be user friendly it needs to install missing parts itselves but that still doesn't help clients that are not allowed to install software.

The screenshots look promising though.

I still would like to see the demo so i will try this at home on my game pc, see if that works.

[MGDESIGN]

Tried to dl the demo.exe when it started it crashed

Sorry to hear that. Could you please provide more information :

• what is your OS ?
• what is your graphics card ?
• did the application crash without any notice, or did it display something ? a snapshot would be welcome, or a copy of crash dump files.

[MGDESIGN]

Is the baking process automated?

Yes, it is mostly automated.

It allows to select a desired texel density, say for example, 1 pixel for 1cm², and then works from there to generate the UVs for lightmaps, and lighting information, optimized for the specified texel density.

Some special cases can defined, such "don't bake lighting for objects with self-illum", etc.

Just to be clear, the baking is not computed by VRay, it is computed by a tool of ours that allow to precompute global illumination, and approximate VRay results.

[MGDESIGN]

Thanks for your feedback !

My next question is... How Much? Is this still a work in progress or are these tools available to the community yet? Very promising.

I look forward to seeing the software.

Right right the tools are for internal use only, we use them to create custom applications for on-demand projects.

Right now, you would have a hard time using the tools are most are made to be used by programmers... but we're working on that...

[MGDESIGN]

Erik, thanks for your detailed report,

I still am on an old quadro with 256 meg, it needs 512 to work.
A lot of clients still have onboard video or cheap graphics cards, so they still won't be able to use this.

With this demo, we clearly do not target onboard video, or low end graphics cards. Depending on projects, we can consider middle-end platforms, but, to make sure we can obtain a good graphics quality, we prefer to 'impose' our clients a minimum specification machine.

Computer configuration: Microsoft Corporation GDI Generic OpenGL 11
Where the last line is in red.

This message is due to the checking of the version of OpenGL supported by your system. Wierd that you NVidia does not have OpenGL installed... Can you tell me what is your OS and driver version ?

For something like this to be user friendly it needs to install missing parts itselves but that still doesn't help clients that are not allowed to install software.

Our clients do have the problem, that's why our applications are self-sufficient to run : they don't rely on any system component. The only thing that we rely on is graphics hardware and drivers. We usually provide the latest graphics drivers with our applications so that clients can install them (or ask them to be installed).

Once again, it is a question of graphics quality and quality insurance. We prefer to block the use of the application if the driver is untested, rather that to have the application to crash or misbehave at startup.

The screenshots look promising though.
I still would like to see the demo so i will try this at home on my game pc, see if that works.

Thanks! Keep me posted about your thoughts.

[kiteman]

Thank you very much for the demo. He has worked very well.
At first I took control but then it is easy to handle.

By the way, why change the refresh rate of 85 to 60, in my case?

Regards.

[Sawyer]

I am using windows 7 with a Quadro fx 580. After it asks me if I want to change my res (I use default settings) I see the splash screen but then it crashes - says unexpected error and application must close.
I do have dual monitors. Dont know if that will affect it. I may try on another desktop later if I get a moment.

[Erik de Graaf]

Well just tried it at my game pc and must say i'm pretty impressed with it. Walking around in a render is a new experience for me, looks very good.
At work i am using XP64, at home i am using WIN764 with a Nvidia GTX285.
Different from work is that i got an installer at home i didn't get at work, install was automatic and it all ran fine, even @ 1920x1440 16x antialiasing.

I did miss my machine gun and hand grenades though ).

[EricCamper]

I have XP 64, NVidia Quadro fx 4500, 8 gigs ram

When I hit launch i get

Open GL does not support one of the following extensions
-GL_ARB_texture_multisample
_GL_EXT_framebuffer_sRGB

The application will now close

[MGDESIGN]

I have XP 64, NVidia Quadro fx 4500, 8 gigs ram

Sorry, but the Quadro FX 4500 is a generation too old to run this application : as you can see here, it is based on the same architecture as the GeForce 7, the demo needs at least GeForce 8 to run.