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Apr 15
Love0

Manhattan X: New York Model for Flight Simulator X

By Flight Simulator X

Aerosoft.com have released their scenery package of New York for Microsoft Flight Simulator X. Designed with helicopters in mind, the scenery can also be explored with small aircrafts or ships.

The movie below provides an insight into the models detail:

Features:

  • Covers the entire Manhattan Island (East Side, West Side, Uptown and Downtown) plus Ellis Island, Governors Island, Roosevelt Island, Statue Island.
  • Four heliports
  • Very high density scenery with hundreds of detailed buildings
  • Full FSX features using bump maps, advanced shading and reflections
  • Scheduled ship traffic (Staten Island Ferries)
  • Many special effects included (like sounds, smoke, birds)
  • Mission that lets you take a $199 helicopter tour of Manhattan
  • Professionally designed charts with all helicopter routes

To find out more take a look at Manhattan X over at Aerosoft.

Apr 14
Love0

Cities in Flight: Animated Short

By Architectural Animation


Cities In Flight from Charlie McCulloch on Vimeo.

The movie above by Charlie McCulloch is loosly based on Cities in Flight by James Blish. Amazon describe the story as one of the grandest, and certainly one of the best written, of wide-screen space operas, Blish’s Cities in Flight takes us from the collapse of American civilisation at the moment of its greatest scientific success to its final transfiguration at a moment of cosmic disaster. New York, enclosed in a vast dome, and powered by anti-gravity and hyper- drive, wanders among the stars, a labourer for hire, and yet also the seed of humanity’s brief ascendancy in a hostile galaxy.

We really like the movies style and the editing combined with the models defiantly evokes a feeling of the Blish novels.

Apr 13
Love0

Unity Game Engine

By Game Engines, Unity

Wikipedia describes Unity as an integrated authoring tool for creating 3D video games or other interactive content such as architectural visualizations or real-time 3D animations. Unity is similar to Director, Blender game engine, Virtools or Torque Game Builder in the sense that an integrated graphical environment is the primary way of authoring the game.

The editor runs on Windows and Mac OS X and can produce games for Windows, Mac, Wii, or iPhone platforms. It can also produce browser games that use the Unity web player plugin, supported on Mac and Windows.

The movie below by 3dnemo provides an insight into the possibilities:

Version 2.5 now supports the ability to drag and drop .max files right into the Editor, including support for all skeletal based animation, multiple UVs, and vertex colors. This builds on the existing support for Maya, Blender, and all other 3D applications that integrate with the latest FBX plugin on the Windows platform.

There are two main licenses: Unity Indie ($199), and Unity Pro ($1499). The Pro version has additional features like render-to-texture, postprocessing effects, and the ability to build standalone Windows games. Unity Pro is also required for businesses with over $100,000 turnover/year.

The second movie, again by 3dnemo , illustrates a cityscape running within Unity:

We will be taking a closer look at Unity over the coming weeks, for now see http://unity3d.com/unity/ for more information.

Thanks go to an anonymous commenter in our post on hyperShot: Near Realtime Rendering System for Windows and Mac for mentioning Unity…

Update – See our Sample City Exhibition Space in Unity for Windows and Mac.

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