As we mentioned in our post on Half Life 0 Oblivion 1 the engine behind Oblivion offers a lot of potential for architectural visualisation.
It has taken a couple of days but we finally have first stage work flow for importing models into Oblivion. The movie below shows the first beta output using our model of the Quad at University College London. The start of the movie is slightly dark due to the compression going into YouTube, we cycle through to daylight half way through the movie. A higher resolution version can be downloaded at the end of this post.
The Quad model was built to examine rapid modelling techniques (see our previous entry) for games and Google Earth. By importing it into a games engine it opens up the possibilities to rapidly visualise environments, both urban and rural.
We will put a tutorial online documenting the process as soon as its refined, thanks go to Joel at CASA for his help on the work flow…
Download a compressed version of the movie (16Mb .wmv) or high resolution (96Mb .wmv).
What are you using to model? Max? Sketchup?
We used SketchUp first and then imported into Max. From there we exported into the Oblivion Engine. There are a few ‘hoops’ to jump through before it works and we hope to find a more direct route from SketchUp without involving Max.
I’ll post some more updates on progress and a walk through guide once its all in place.
Andy
This is pretty cool! Is it possible to make the photo based textures self illuminating, like a surface shader so that the shadows don’t conflict?
Have you gotten the imported models to produce shadows on the terrain around them?
I don’t know how the Oblivion engine works, but in terms of lighting, using the Source engine might be a better choice. Imported models (props)are able to cast shadows.
Where can you buy the Oblivion game engine?
Paul
Paul – I’ve put a link up to amazon:
http://astore.amazon.com/digiurba-20
🙂
Andy
Andy
Thanks, how do you get your model from Max into the Oblivion engine?
Paul
I’m an avid Oblivion modder and I am blown away by your work here. I knew from the get go that the Oblivion toolkit was an amazing value- so much functionality for so little $$$. The only problem is the lack of serious (produced by the dev team) API documentation and the many facets of the engine that Bethesda is keeping under wraps. Your work here would be very, very valuable to users of the TES toolkit, please post again when you have your tuturorial put together, even in a “half baked” stage!!!
Andy
Have been able to create a tutorial to get MAX into Oblivion?
Best Regards
Paul