Virtualizing a 100 years old house (July Morning Challenge) "Download link added"

Hello and welcome to my short but hopefully interesting blog about my project that i started 1 month ago. Also i decided to participate on the July Morning Challenge to further push myself.

DOWNLOAD THE DEMO HERE => OneDrive Download

//Start

The whole project started when i started my “intern” (it’s a practice phase of my college 3 months of work outside the school) at my local community. I layed down suggestions for a 3d model of a house that’s in renovating stages. The house is 100+ years old and is dispalying our local culture and the culture of the Slovenien country how it was back in the days. The mayor and other associated with the renovation project really liked the idea of a digital tour of the house where you can look around and see how the house looks directly from your home. So the work began.

//The pictures

To give the building life in CG it had to be a 1:1 in scale. The more you’re picky about things and put in detail the more the whole thing gets believable.

//The modeling

Staying true to the open source i am using blender a multi tool in video editing, animation, cg, modeling. The program is powerful in features that it comes close to maya or other closed, paid modeling programs. Because it’s realtime the tris count has to be low. The whole scene is 150.000 triangles big. High poly version is around 7M. My poor i5 760 barely handles it :(.

//The textureing

The program used here is Substance Painter it’s paid but they have a nice indie licence, one time buy, relatively cheap and a linux version. It uses a non desturctive smart materials workflow in other words you can do magic with this.

//Unreal Engine

I choose UE4. The difficulty is much greater than unity but if you can get around the benefits can be big. Because i have a slow internet connection i couldn’t download the free assets such as trees, grass to enrich the surroundings. That will be added soon. (The shadows are weird at times don’t know how to lightmap jet)

Well that’s it i hope you enjoyed the progress. It’s short i know but i am tired i was working the whole night through. The packaging process gave me headaches… The project itself is a success. Everyone really liked it. The mayor even gave me a recommendation letter that i can use if i am gonna search for a job.

Thank you for your time and see you around on the forum.

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Impressive. Do you know if UE4 assets can be converted to files recognizable by 3D printing software? I should probably just stick to 3DS Max anyway...

Great job though!

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Thanks. I don't know but everything on the marketplace is only allowed to be used in ue4.

I am very impressed. I dabbled with blender for a while, due to a class about it, and I could never get decent renders like you have here. This looks like it took a lot of time and effort. Good job.

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One tip that i can give you is don't make hard edges. There isnt a sigle think that is 100% sharp. So cranc up the subdivision i go to 3x 4x or if your computer can't handel it bake it to the low poly model and delete the high poly one.

...or use tight width bevels instead, can save a whole lot of polys and achieve the same look in many cases.

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Man this would be awesome for my house project and visualisation, I have Blender installed but due to timeframe I used Sketchup as that's an easy low barrier to entry. I really do need to spend some time in Blender working out the basics - I know there's youtube tutorials I should be working through.

Nice work, I'm very impressed.

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Thank you that means alot. Yep blender is let's say 80% Keyboard shortcuts and functionality buried under a do it all UI. PS: The real term is more architecture than virtualization isn't it.

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I did something like this many years ago in jr. high school and used valve's hammer editor to model the tech wing of my school. I think it was called World Craft back then. Anyway....they put an end to that after about a weeks worth of work lol.

Looks good. Any chance you'll add commentary for historical reference for those virtual tourists?

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At this point it's out of my hands. They made a deal with a university of IT to port the project onto a webside for DL or direct play. And yes it think they will add furniture and stuff.

What i have to do/add now is.
- Fix shadows
- add grass and a tree
- maybe play around with that new volumetric fog
- make glass transparent

Arch Viz. for Architectural Visualization.

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Very impressive. A project like this streamlined would be a real estate's wet dream or a game asset creator's way to slack off.

I think you're on to something cool.

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I've added a download link for the Demo. It's in the beginning of the blog. Hope everything works and enjoy.

Updated the pictures in the post with added grass, vegetation, a tree and optimized bushes.
Attention! the new version of the architectural visualisation requers now a dedicated graphics card.

Minimum:

  • GTX 460 1 GB (30 fps at 1080p)
  • 4-8 GB ram
  • I5-760 or greater (prefered overclock to 4 Ghz)