Google 3D Warehouse: Importing into Crysis

The latest in our series of posts on importing into the Crysis Sandbox looks at the Google 3D Warehouse. The warehouse is a repository of over 200,000 models and a unique archive of buildings and street furniture from around the world.

Its taken some time but we now have a path for importing any model from the 3D Warehouse into Crysis, the movie below details the Tate Modern:



We are not sure what the license implications are, but as soon as we know and as soon as the latest exporter is out from EA (soon) we will have a tutorial and work flow online.

Our progress to date movie is embedded below, featuring the Swiss Re, Tower Bridge and work in the Sandbox:



The potential of using the 3D warehouse in Crysis is intriguing to say the least...

HDR City Photographs: Tokyo

After our posts on HDR photographs of New York a quick update to point those interested to images of Toyko captured using the same technique...

See 10 Pictures of Tokyo Gotham using HDR.

A tutorial and sample files will follow as soon as the weather in London allows - it could be months ;)

HDR City Photographs

Our plans to capture High Dynamic Range (HDR) images in Hong Kong were put to rest due to mist and London seems to of been lost in drizzle for months. As soon as we get the right conditions a full tutorial will appear on the blog as its part of the forthcoming book.

In the meantime Stuck in Customs - unique photography for unique people have some stunning HDR images of New York.

It is well worth taking a look at the full set of photographs via the main Stuck in Customs page.

London in Crysis: Update 3 Tower Bridge, Swiss Re & The Sandbox

An update post and movie detailing our progress on importing our Virtual London model into Crysis. We have now been working on the model for little under a week at CASA and progress is good, the geometry has been extended out to Tower Bridge and we are experimenting with various texture configurations.

The movie below provides an insight into the movie to date with sections from both gameplay and sandbox modes to illustrate how the model is edited:


The move from holding the model in a fully functional Geographic Information System, aka ESRI's ArcScene to SketchUp, 3D Max and a finally into the Crysis Sandbox has been interesting. The engine is probably the most powerful on the market today and the speed in which it is possible to work is refreshing.

See our previous post for more movies, including a texture mapped model direct from SketchUp:

Crysis - Importing City Models: St Pauls Cathedral

We will have more updates and a tutorial as soon as the workflow is finalised.

Architectural Visualisation - Alpha Vision

A couple of days ago we put up a post on Caseyville Forest Lake - Digital Real Estate Marketing it turns out the movie was created by Alpha Vision. The company was founded in 1993 with the vision to realise the market potential for three dimensional computer graphics solutions. With over 100 staff and based in Miami their output is notable for its quality and presentation.

Embedded below is their Trend Homes Marque marketing movie:



While aimed at the high end of the market in terms of real estate purchase the animations differ considerably to what would be seen in the more 'urban' type UK presentation from the likes of Squint/Opera or Design Hive.

A number of Alpha Vision's movies are 'embedding disabled' so it is well worth looking direct at their YouTube channel.

See Alpha Vision's website for more details.

Virtual Lower East Side New York: MTV's Virtual World - A Glimpse of a Populated Virtual Earth?

vLES or Virtual Lower East Side is a replica of the area in New York City created by MTV.

Of note is the starting point from Google Earth into the Virtual World - perhaps a glimpse of how a 'Second Earth' would look and operate?

The movie below provides an insight into vLES:



You can find out more and download the software at http://vles.com/

Archidemo: Tokyo Metropolitan University in Second Life

We have just recieved a email from Hidenori Watanave, Associate professor of Tokyo Metropolitan University about his groups "Archidemo" project in Second Life.

"Archidemo" consists of experimental demonstration and research into the
possibility of architecture and environmental design in the Metaverse. The use of panoramas and the explorations of levels of zoom within an environment is quite interesting, it is worth taking a look at the YouTube movie embedded below:



You can find out more about the project from http://archidemo.blogspot.com/

Event: Digital Geography in a Web 2.0 World, Barbican Cinema 2, London

We are pleased to announce a CASA and Digital Urban one day event at the Barbican Cinema 2 in London: Digital Geography in a Web 2.0 World. The event on February 20th will see a series of talks from the leaders in the field of neogeography and visualisation.

With talks ranging from Sim City for Real to our GMap Creator, MapTube and Image Cutter software suite its looking like a good event. We are talking on Web 2.0, Neogeography and Virtual Worlds so if you a reader of the blog and can get to London we hope to see you there.

The event is free of charge, simply go to our event page and email for the required password, you will then be able to register online.

The full programme can be viewed from here.

Note spaces are strictly limited.

Architectural Tutorials: 3D World Magazine March 2008

This months 3D World Magazine (March 2008) is an essential purchase - it features 16 pages of tips and tutorials for architectural visualisation.

Highlights include a tutorial on inserting 3D models into a video clip using Boujou Bullet and techniques for mastering compositing in a New York street scene.

It should be available in all good newsagents as we type..

More at the 3D World Website (note the previous issue is still featured on the site).

Nokia N95 as a 3G Modem on a Mac: Connected outside of the City

When we leave the city and the safety of an almost constant connection to the Internet there are times when we need to check our email, run a blog post or just catch up with some work.

Having experienced some time out of town this weekend we still needed to be in touch with the outside server world and so turned to our trusty Nokia N95 and its built in 3G modem.

We have been Mac users now for a month, having finally jumped ship from windows after 10 years as a result one to many Vista nightmares. Set up was surprisingly easy with us connecting to the Internet via our N95 and Vodafone in under 5 minutes.

All that is needed is a quick trip to the Nokia page for the isync plugin and then the simple question of enabling bluetooth on both the N95 and the Mac.

Running through 'Set Up Bluetooth Device' was straightforward with a screen requesting user name and password for our carrier - in our case Vodafone. We picked up the details from Ross Barkmen's GPRS Info Page which carries usernames and passwords for most services providers around the world.

With the password in place it was simply a case of opening our network preferences and connecting via Bluetooth.

It enabled us to post a couple of entries today and finally feel connected regardless of location. All we need do now is move from Vodafone who allow (in their words) a 'massive 120mb per month' of data to T Mobiles unlimited Web 'n' Walk that seems to be getting all the hype recently.

Hyland Village: Digital Real Estate Marketing

Selling real estate from plot is visualisation intensive, the 3D urban visualisation acts as the marketing movie for the development.

As such the levels of investment made in such animations are notable, allowing highly polished and therefore cutting edge animations. Styles vary according to the target demographic with funky city apartments receiving a different treatment to your typical family orientated development.

Hyland Village is an example of marketing a new life style and neighborhood unit. Built by McStain Neighborhoods, a Colorado developer and homebuilder, Hyland Village aims to offer (note marketing speak):

a vibrant alternative to typical suburban neighborhoods. Imagine leaving your car in the garage for a whole weekend. Here, you'll be able to walk to the boutiques and services on Main Street, to the neighborhood pool and community center, to the charming parks, and to the miles of trails along the Farmers' High Line Canal. And as you're walking, you can revel in the details of traditional neighborhood design: front porches, quaint tree-lined streets, architectural variety, tucked-away alleys and inspired street scenes.

We were impressed by the visualisation, its a nice compact 3 minute movie that does its best to provide a feel of the development...

You can find out more from http://www.myhylandvillage.com

Caseyville Forest Lake - Digital Real Estate Marketing

If three dimensional models are going to be used to market new developments they need to be professional as the movie becomes the main selling tool.

Forest Lake is a 500 acre new development in St Louis, USA, accompanied by a slick voice over the marketing clip does it job:



The interesting thing about the movie is the price - family homes come in at $200,000 or £100,000. In the suburbs of London, where are currently writing this, Studio Flats - thats one room - are on the market for around £250,000 or $500,000.

Where do we sign up?

Blog Look/Layout Time for a Revamp (?)

Our partner blog 'World Worst Urban' suffered a minor setback this morning when we accidentally clicked 'update template' without any sort of back up.

As such our morning has been spent getting at least a temporary version back up and running - and with it comes a new look - the header and logo is yet to be decided so any thoughts are welcome. The current one is merely temporary.

Which got us thinking, digital urban is over due a similar revamp, we kind of like the layout on Worlds Worst Urban and are thinking about porting it over - such as the location of the recent comments etc. Any thoughts on a revamp of digital urban really are most welcome....

Btw - various comments around the web seem to of got the wrong idea on the Worlds Worst Urban Places and Spaces book - its a 'tongue in cheek' look at the worlds urban planning and architectural disasters. Its not a negative view of the world by any means, in many ways its a celebration of what is a bit grim in our urban environment - maybe its a London thing to appreciate the urban space around us that is slightly rubbish?

We will be featuring some of the recent contributions in the coming weeks - thanks to all those who have contributed so far and keep adding them to our Flick Pool :)

Andy

Jubliee Church by Richard Meier: 3D Animation

Three dimensional models/animations of churches are amongst our favorite here at digital urban - there is something about the architecture and the use of space and lighting that creates intricate and often beautiful models.

The Jubilee Church designed by Richard Meier in Rome is one such example, although a modern day take on religious space it is without question magnificent.

Robert Angelis created a 3D model of the church as part of his degree thesis, taking 2 months to render the animation is one to sit back and watch, the quality speaks for itself:



The Jubilee Church, whose religious title "Dives in Misericordia" is derived from the Letter of St. Paul to the Ephesians chap. 2.4 (God, who is rich in mercy), is the jewel in the crown of the Vicariato di Roma (Arch Diocese of Rome) Millennium Project.

The project features concrete, stucco, travertine, soaring glass skylights and three dramatic shells or arcs evoking gliding white sails. Unprecedented in Richard Meier's work, the concrete arcs are graduated in height from 56 to 88 feet.

See http://www.richardmeier.com/ for more info and projects.

Video Trace: 3D Models from Video

VideoTrace is a system for interactively generating realistic 3D models of objects from video. The user interacts with VideoTrace by tracing the shape of the object to be modelled over one or more frames of the video.

By interpreting the sketch drawn by the user in light of 3D information obtained from computer vision techniques, a small number of simple 2D interactions can be used to generate a realistic 3D model.

In many ways the system is similar to the sadly demised CANOMA but with video, the movie below provides a good insight into how Video Trace works:



By way of simple comparison with CANOMA below is a movie we created some 8 years ago from a postcard - if we had the video capability it would of provided a similar output to Video Trace:





A version of CANOMA but from video is an intriguing step forward - if this can be semi-automated then low end rapid capture of city models could be round the corner.

You can find out more about Video Trace via their main page.

London Aerial Photography - 4cm Super Zoom

192.com has published the highest resolution imagery of London we have seen. Coming in at a staggering 4cm resolution the imagery is of such quality to pin point individuals and with it come privacy concerns.

The Guardian's Technology section has a full article covering these issues:

The map, from 192.com, publishes aerial photography at a resolution of 4cm for London and 12.5cm for the rest of the UK. In the right conditions, images at this resolution are enough to identify individuals - a step that existing online mapping ventures such as Google Earth and Microsoft's Virtual Earth have so far been careful to avoid.

You can read the full article here.

View the imagery direct from 192.com.maps/

* as an update - the site has great resolution but the interface and screen layout is poor - if it was in Google Maps or Live Local it would be great, as it is its a bit of a disappointment *

*you can view the maps full screen via a beta flash interface by clicking here - the extra screen space definitely helps. Thanks to eAI for the tip in our comments box, the long URL got truncated, thus our update*

Virtual Purdue: Future City Animation

Istanbul is at such high risk for a devastating earthquake that engineers at Purdue University and the Republic of Turkey have come up with a bold new proposal: build a second city.

A second, satellite city would provide immediate refuge to inhabitants of the old city in the event of a catastrophic earthquake and soften such an event's effects on the nation's economy.

The animation of the future Turkish city was created in two months by using the TeraGrid, a National Science Foundation-funded research computing grid.

Purdue is one of 11 research institutions that comprise TeraGrid, which is the world's largest open science computing grid. The movie is embedded below:



The animation was rendered using the TeraGrid Distributed Rendering Environment, or TeraDRE, developed by research scientists in Information Technology at Purdue.

See Purdue University News for more info.

It would be interesting to read peoples thoughts on the output, feel free to post your comments..

SketchUp City

SketchUp is almost custom made for creating fantasy cityscapes and continuing our series of SketchUp Cities we feature a movie uploaded by shady110:



We like its style, also nice to see the Bank of China crop up in the model - possibly one of our favourite buildings - see our Flickr Pool for a panorama of the Bank of China we captured last week.

You can download Sketchup from http://www.sketchup.com

SketchUp - Photo Match and Compositing

It's becoming increasingly difficult to remember how we survived before YouTube, it is becoming an invaluable resource for tutorials and tips in 3D modelling.

One gem comes from http://go-2-school.com/ who provide video training on SketchUp via either their DVD or YouTube. Embedded below is their tutorial on how to use the Photo Match feature in Google SketchUp for Compositing:



They have 70 videos so far on their YouTube channel which is well worth a look if your a SketchUp user.

If your new to Google SketchUp you can download it for free from http://www.sketchup.com/