Halcyon Real Time Engine

[RErender]

its not compatible with x64. it was mentioned in the post above.

All i saw was that the engine was 32bit

[LightCraft]

just to fill you guys in on some history, its taken me many years to get to this point,
I have a list as long as my arm of features i would love to have in it, but there is only so much 1 guy can do after work.
i have recently quit my day job and am starting on V2 fulltime, number 1 priority was to get to this first stage, a stable release for viewing GI baked models. which is what i needed for most projects i have done.
I will now start adding other features, such as sound, bump, x64, animation and a whole bunch of other things.
just keep in mind, there isnt a team of programmers behind Halcyon. it has taken a massive effort to get it to this point
V2 will have more neat stuff, and im happy to listen to users requests. but currently the list of things that it can do is on the site.

I also want to keep the engine as easy to use as possible, for instance by just naming the objects in max and exporting, it takes away the need for a complex editor such as most of the other realtime tools. Adding too many complex features may take away that ease. for instance, how do you make an opening door by naming an object?
its not so easy. thats why engines like quest have an editor. so if you are after something complex that may be your best route.

personally i feel its important for the scene to be set up entirely inside max, so making changes wont see you jumping between programs.
Baking GI into the model is as easy as rendering to texture, and viewing your model is only a couple of clicks away.

I see the main potential of this to show architects and designers their architectural space fully lit with pixel perfect GI and to navigate to any area and see how it looks.

As far as a demo goes, i am unsure on how to make time limited demos etc, and since the process is so easy i really dont see the need.
heres the basic procedure www.lightcraftresearch.com/howto.html
basically name your objects. for instance if you want baked 2 pass GI
apply a texture map, bake the GI, in the object name put TXLightMap, and export. there is other names you can use for other features, such as LOD0#100# for level of detail that dissapears after 100 units
it really doesnt get any easier.

cheers for the interest

[ShaunDon]

It says 15k per object on the site.

Very interesting... I'll enjoy taking a look at this! I wish that I was more comfortable with texture baking.

Thanks,
Shaun

[phildlight]

you beat me to this. I started working on the same thing about 1.5 years ago. I got pretty far, and was able to get my own geometry in, but it's just not user friendly. not an easy process going from max model to engine. Good luck! I don't know if I can help in any way, but feel free to pm me for email.

[LightCraft]

An interesting thing you can do in Halcyon is make a sphere, add a panorama you have rendered on to it, and it lets you view a super smooth panorama.
Anyone experienced with quicktime knows how jerky and aliased a pano can look.
These panos run fullscreen at 75 fps !
with the full version you can change aspect ratio and fov, so you can span it across 2 monitors if you have an nvidia card.

http://www.lightcraftresearch.com/Panoramas.zip

@phildlight
yeah its no easy job coding an RT engine, .net has made this easier, but i appreciate now how long it takes to make a game and how many people you need.
I may give you a buzz in the future, are you familiar with .net?

@ShaunDon
Dont be scared of texture baking, its as easy as selecting render to texture, adding lighting map and hitting render. The key to a good texture bake is in making it high resolution enough so you dont get black corners. i have also noticed that making sure all walls are snapped makes a big difference.

[jacksc02]

Lightcraft, this looks really good, we do a lot of this work and are looking to move to a better package, let me know if you looking for a beta tester

[jacksc02]

Lightcraft- where in the world are you based?

[LightCraft]

Hey jack

im 15 mins from you in Sydney lol
say hi to sunny for me. years ago when Halcyon was still very young
he came over to perth to check it out. it was early days back then for the engine, and i think you guys went down the quest road? if i am not mistaken.
You guys are also playing with some scripts i wrote, Geo paint.
oh by the way i worked with fern for a while after he left ivolve.
hes into making games last time i caught up with him.

small world huh?

[jacksc02]

very small world, sunny had guessed it was you.

[beestee]

We are in the process of looking for a way to visualize our models in realtime. I have familiarized myself with most of the options available, but like you say, it is a hassle to learn another program and have to switch back and forth. I am interested to see what IMAGTP is going to do with CryEngine2, but I feel that may be out of our league. If this is as easy as it seems to be, and if we can get that kind of quality, this would be a no-brainer for us as it would almost work right into our workflow.

Awesome product, keep us updated!

[LightCraft]

thanks for your interest beestee

ease of use was my main aim with Halcyon, as there seems to be alot of mucking around with the other RT solutions.
keep in mind that cry engine doesnt do GI.
Im working on a few demos right now, that are going to show the engine off as best as possible. most of the work i have done with it have nda attached to them or use textures that come from my texture library i have, and i really dont have a clue as to which textures i can freely give away or ones i have grabbed from various websites. So i am starting from scratch to be safe. this way i wont get into any hassles because i used a texture from something copyrighted.
so stay tuned some nice demos coming very soon.

[jacksc02]

is there going to be any support for collision detection?

[LightCraft]

It originally had Collission detection, but it was pretty unstable as you needed to have geometry that was watertight, or you would get stuck or fall through in places, i had issues with differences in detection between nvidia and ati cards, so i have put it on hold until i figure out a workaround.

I have to admit, collission detection didnt really help with navigating the scene, as you would always be getting stuck in stairwells and tight rooms especially when clients took control.
i figured that as a tool to view a space from an architectural tool, it really hindered it as most clients want the freedom to go where they wanted.

i will be looking into it regardless though. so im putting it on the wishlist.

cheers

[VKNT]

An interesting thing you can do in Halcyon is make a sphere, add a panorama you have rendered on to it, and it lets you view a super smooth panorama.
Anyone experienced with quicktime knows how jerky and aliased a pano can look.
These panos run fullscreen at 75 fps !

Is it comparable to the smoothness of devalVR?
www.devalVR.com

[percydaman]

wow that devalVR is pretty darn smooth!