OK, enough with the Vray / MentalRay battle.....

OK, enough with the Vray / MentalRay battle.....

As far as Real-time goes Mental Ray wins.... because in the Unreal world it provides the most compatible texture in MAX for import into the game engine and as for our production team typically importing more than 20,000 static meshes, that ends the debate. 

Personally, Mental Ray wins in every other aspect of rendering as well.  We have had several shootouts between the V and the M renderers several times and it is always a draw, even when one side or the other has a more experienced render jockey. In the end when juried by the people that are clueless as to even what a renderer is; THEY CANNOT TELL THE DIFFERENCE.  (....that is especially true to the one person that counts, our client.)

Now if your creating what I call "Cheaters" 3D by rendering several stupid long images and then photshopping them together... then Vray your little hearts out. BUT if you create "Real" comprehensive 3D environments that can be directly imported into a 3D engine, then Mental ray is your tool.

Some new images.....

For my buddies over at cgArchitect.com ....

3d real-time model in Unreal 3 ARCHengine(tm) of Dallas Cowboys Stadium for HKS, Inc. architects

Model Specifics
   -38+ million polys
   -(secret) GB of textures
   -all dynamically lit
   -over 500 speedtrees(tm)

A trillion dollar deficit.....

A triilion dollar deficit is:

   - A stack of $100 bills 1,578 miles high
   - A bit more than $3,000 for every man woman and child in the USA
   - wow! 573,921 square miles of paper the bills are printed on (Texas is 268,601 sq. miles)


ok.... enough! (of this post and the deficit)

Kewl!!! Unreal 3 on the iPhone....

OK, this is really neet and we are playing with this right now. It's just a matter of getting our models down in size to be playable on the iOS system....

Also, coming up with the scenarios on how this applys to the designer/marketer in conversations/pitches or such. Definately a tool for the inpromptu marketing opportunity on the ole' DART bus or commuter train or airplane, restaurant, hotel bar, etc. when someone asks what do you do.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pzts8tsKuHs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3NwYj-zgJk


....Hi! what do you do?? Well, it's hard to explain, I develop architectural 3D presentations using a game engine..... huh, a game engine? OK, look here on my L33T iPhone ....see, that's what I do.

Oh!! That is way Kewl!!!

Lacie Drives = BAD

Just a heads up.... over the last several years we have been using various Lacie hard drives, RAID drives, etc.... Every one of them has failed within 24 months or so.

One word.

Revit.

Use it. Live it. Be it. ......or die.

I have lived from the drafting board, to mainframe CAD, to PC CAD; BIM is what was talked about 33 years ago.

You change one thing on the 3D model and all the pages are updated.

'nuf said.

Autodesk University.... musings.

Well another year has gone by and another Autodesk University has come and gone ('course I remember when it was called "Cad Camp" - sigh).

Revit is ruling the roost. MAX is a changin', and Autodesk is still buying every company I have been familiar with over the last 20 years and some very new ones as well. I think this may be a good thing as Adesk is finally getting a bit looser in opening their file formats; by letting other companies write file exchange with Autodesk cooperating with them (aka Sketchup and others) THIS IS A GOOD THING (if they keep this up I'll stop referring top them as Automess)

So it's back to work tomorrow..... Cheers!

New!!! Unreal Developer Kit released....

Epic Game UDK (Unreal Development Kit)
http://developer.nvidia.com/object/udk.html

All you architect/engineer real-time wannabee's
It's a good place to start ....

You can use MAX modelsYou can use it for all the things you think you can use it for:

It's a design communication tool - the best available.
Show the comprehensive design to the client..(the good and the bad )
Show the city the building in context...
Show the bank all the varied uses the building will have...... and on and on...


Good luck !

6 months later......

OK, forums is cleaned out of .... all the ick.

Time Lag......

OK, I am not a timely blogger. I have been traveling extensivly and we have really been busy. It also looks like our Forums, even with the safegaurds, have once again been visited by the ever present, yet uninvited, pron-ites... sorry 'bout that, but we'll get the Forum cleaned up ASAP.

The HKS/ARCHengine/BIMMIT presentation I gave at SPAR2009 went really well and I have received numerous requests for a copy of my presentation so I'll get a 'pdf' version of the presentation up by early next week on the Forum.

We are now integrating a new renderer, "Lightmass", into the Epic Unreal 3 codebase and it will be interesting to see how it handles 30+ million polys.... woot.

Back soon.

Here are some press articles about what we have been up to lately....

1. http://info.aia.org/aiarchitect/thisweek09/0306/0306p_hks.cfm
2. http://videogames.yahoo.com/feature/dallas-cowboys-new-stadium-built-with-videogame-technology/1288021
3. http://www.bdcnetwork.com/article/CA6559456.html
4. http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/dec2007/id20071221_129534.htm

kewl.

.oK, we're off to GDC 2009 next week...
.after that SPAR 2009 conference - giving a talk about BIMMIT(TM)/ARCHengine(TM)
.after that (secret)......
.our new thing = BIMMIT(TM) Building Information Model; Model Input Technology
.still implementing new code in U3....late q4 debut for ARCHengine v3 (AEv3)(or..when we are finished)
.importing more and more polys than ever.... eat my shorts LM (you know who you are)
.just received our new "DOGhouse systems" computers....23k+ on 3DMark06 - Stethman "rulz"
.our new RED camera is going to be interesting as we integrate live/recorded 4k video into AEv3 system (BWA_hahahahahahaha)
.oooooooooooo, Zebra Imaging kewl stuff going on there
.btw, we can now do outside work if anyone needs real-time 3d stuff ...call
Technology (Point Cloud to Revit model technology)

Revit Architecture Suite 2009 Student Version

Hey there! It's been a while, but we have been very busy integrating all the new features of Unreal 3 into our ARCHengine(tm) application..... whew!

I get a lot of students inquiring on how to get into 'real-time' - the best way we know is to use Revit / MAX / Unreal as your creation pipeline for creation of the models and input into the game engines. So with that in mind i want to be sure ya'll know that the new STUDENT VERSION of Revit Architecture 2009 is available. There are a lot of places to get it, but here is a link to one :

http://www.creationengine.com/html/p.lasso?p=15226

You have to prove your are a student somewhere, but by all means get the Revit Student Edition and start learning. Also, here is an excellent website for Revit tutorials:

http://www.dgcad.com/

Cheers.... rtRanger