Architectural Visualization

Hello all! Here is a video of an architectural visualization that ECS produced in 2015 for the Veterans Health Administration SimLEARN program to showcase their brand new, state of the art VA Sim Center in Lake Nona, FL.

The entire project was built as a real-time environment with a high level of physical accuracy, utilizing the original REVIT data. This animation was captured entirely from Unity using the real-time scene, shaders, and effects. A Web Player based interactive walk-through capability and a desktop Oculus Rift DK2 Virtual Reality experience were also produced using the same project and assets.

 

Here are some final screenshots from key areas around the facility, all captured directly from Unity.

 

Beautiful. As someone who uses Unity at my day job for technical visualizations, I love seeing what others are using it for outside of gaming. I think the "clean" look is tough to pull off in real-time, but you've done a great job of it here.

 

Looks really nice! I would be nice to know a little bit about your workflow. For example what 3D modeling software did you use and was there some baking used before bringing the model into Unity?

 

@pluhn Thanks for the positive feedback, much appreciated.

@mk1978 For this particular project we were given Revit data as well as architectural plans. Using those as reference we rebuilt the facility from scratch in 3ds Max to keep the geometry as optimized as possible. Props and equipment were also all modeled in 3ds Max. All texturing was done in Photoshop with normals generated in in Crazybump. Lighting was all done within 3ds Max and baked using Mental Ray. We’ve found that we have a lot more control performing the lighting within 3ds Max rather than Enlighten. Feel free to ask any other questions you may have

 

Really nice, congrats!

 

This work looks great! Would you be willing to share a bit more info about your lighting workflow and how you got the bakes into Unity? I did a lot of light baking in Max and Vray when using Unity 4, but with all the changes to the workflow in Unity 5 I haven't spent much time with external baking and have mostly just used enlighten. Thanks!

 

@EricRLA

A little more information about the lighting workflow:

This particular project was a challenge given the scale of the facility and still wanting it to be as optimized as possible. Props and environment shell were handled differently. Since there are so many props throughout the facility we decided against doing any sort of lighting bake on them. They simply have a shared AO map and utilize vertex colors to store ambient color. The environment shell was first given a rough texturing pass to determine how many materials were going to be needed. Then UV2 was manually unwrapped. We knew that not everything would fit on one lightmap so at this point we evaluated which materials could be grouped together and packed into one map. For example, all geometry having ceiling tile or carpet would be grouped into one lightmap. The model was then broken into these lightmap objects and their UV2s were packed. Photometric lights were placed (each using accurate IES profiles). The actual bake was broken into several passes so that we could have more control in the compositing phase (AO, Sky, Main Lights, etc.). We utilized our render farm to bake the individual maps for each lightmap object and then composited all maps in Photoshop. Those were then brought in to Unity and applied to the materials using custom shaders.