Real-time visualization

[MoonDoggie]

Is anyone else using a real-time (possibly game) engine in their production? My experience with game engines is with UT2004, but I would be interested in finding out if anyone is using anything else/better. Thanks!

-Colin

[filip]

I have some little exp. with:

Cubic space RTRE is easy to use - its a plugin to 3dsmax, but it has bad user support and there is not support for multiple channels mapping and shaders...

Quest 3D seems to me that it has great users forum, lot of features, nice results. It is hard to use and learn...

cheers f

[kimgar]

i am also looking at various engines - very hard to settle for one.
the 'good' ones are real expensive, and i can't help but thinking, with all the great open source engines, is a commercial one really worth $4000?

a funcom guy told me it is worth the money in the end, though - working in the games industry i guess he knows what he is talking about...

q3D is good, and not really that hard - the community is great. the schematic scripting put me off a little, and i kinda got stuck in the material/shader section...

i'm looking into blitzMax with gMan's irrrlicht wrapper at the moment, and i really like the price/performance ratio - blitzmax $100 and irrlicht is free, http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/

[SvantePanter]

I use TurnTool a lot. http://www.turntool.com/
It has its roots in a 3d-game project, the game was canceled, but one of the developer brought the game engine futher and adapted it for online use.

You produce TurnTool scenes with a exporter for max. The exporter has inbuilt HTML-templates (Architectural, Collector game and some more). The exporter produce a so called .TNT-file, and a html-page. You can edit the html-page with java script.

They have a good user support at this forum: http://www.turntool.com/forum/

[3dkad]

Hi there,
Quest 3D is very powerful software for real time presentations also. Seems to be very complicated, but in fact for simple real time walk-/flytroughs is pretty easy to use.
Good luck!

[Infrared digital]

I looked into a list of these programs about a year ago and Turntool came up the best especially for VRay.

At the time their licencing rules were so bad that I decided not to buy but, in a strange twist of reality, they have changed their rules recently to some thing that is more normal.

But, I should stress that I haven't used it in production.

[MoonDoggie]

excellent replies, many thanks I will investigate each of these options! Thanks vrayers!

-Colin

[Clifton Santiago]

Those with Quest3d experience: I have looked at the app, and I think I can deal with the geometry, but how does one script an interactive camera with collision detection (and maybe gravity?)

Anyone have experience with Quake 4 level editor for arch viz?

[SvantePanter]

Have a look at my latest production with TurnTool. I have used Vray for some texture baking.

http://www.cubicasa.se/2005/index.ht...grand-interior

Press Shift + F2 once or twice when viewing for data about the scene.
Press Shift + F3 once for viewing the wireframe.

Here is another project that our partners in Bangladesh helped us with:
http://www.cubicasa.se/2005/index.ht...rgatanexterior

[AtlJimK]

We are using UT right now. It is a bit clunky and time-consuming. Bake textures/script objects/dynamic lighting/re-model to smaller quads or cut up large faces.

The clients love it but it is still just more of a gimmick as most clients of mine are not regular FPS users and easily get confused. The true power would be interactive/remote design charretes (sort of a "multi-user"3dsmax session). Still a very powerful tool.

[mchopin]

Hello there,

just a few words to say that the technology used to make redviewer http://www.chaosgroup.com/forum/phpB...40efa3ae9c49ae
is available as a stand-alone real-time 3d engine called redsdk ( www.redsdk.com ).
What you see in redviewer is what you get with redsdk.

Regards,

Matthieu

[rpc212]

Just heard about this EON Raptor is free, but don't know how good it is. Here is the link:

http://www.eonreality.com/raptor/

Supposedly you create everything within Max so that might be good if the results are sufficient!?

[Joost Ink]

Those with Quest3d experience: I have looked at the app, and I think I can deal with the geometry, but how does one script an interactive camera with collision detection (and maybe gravity?)

Anyone have experience with Quake 4 level editor for arch viz?

there is a walk trough scene template, you can just drag and drop that in your scene and replace the collision objects with yours. the cam has gravity by default, but you can change that to 0 example so you can fly trough your scene.

[andrewjohn81]

This is a great thread to keep alive. I didn't know about turntool or rtre before.
The ones i've seen myself are EON, virtools, and Quest3D. EON and Virtools are WAY overpriced (although if all you need is Raptor then EON is a good choice), and I haven't seen as good quality test with Quest.
We had Virtools come to our lab and show us how their product works with our own product. The geometry was really heavy, and not even good (pretty much straight from ProE). There were seems all over the place.

One thing to look for from these things is antialiasing control outside of the video card. You can do some pretty advanced stuff with virtools but, like EON, there is a yearly fee of at least $1400 and it's a huge cost right off the bat. It's more meant for gaming development if you ask me.

We want interactivity, but only to open/close some things and change colors.

Redviewer is nice too, but not a presentation tool. Also, it's really buggy and WAY behind. They just came out with a new version and it doesn't support max9. Same with EON. Virtools at least supports it right now. Check out teapotters.com for their attempt at becomming more of a trendy thing as well. I recently also saw a commercial for their parent company. I still don't like them yet though. Just too expensive.

[SnipeyX]

We've been looking into various options and honestly I'm just amazed with Quest3D, having tried the demo and built a working collision model of my scene in under half an hour (through my own trial and error i figured out the exact same steps posted above to do this) I can't wait for us to buy it and be able to play with the full version.

I've heard of other studios using Anark Studio (www.anark.com) personally I don't think it's what I want, seems too cumbersome, but maybe I'm already biased towards getting Quest. Anyone have any experience with Anark?