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We have built a city as part of our Fantasy Architecture project but until now we have not been able to visualise it in real-time. There are of course high end real-time engines available to architects but these often come at considerable cost. In a series of posts we have been exploring the uses of game engines for architecture, taking this further we are now able to visualise large cityscapes in real-time using Oblivion.



The movie above illustrates the city first with snow fall and then at sunrise, it is still work in progress but for architects the use of a £20 game engine is surely intriguing..

11 Comments

  • Richard Gatti says:

    nice sample. you might want to look at some of the available mods for oblivion – immersive interface for example enables you to turn off the HUD completely, making it look slightly less incongorous in London…
    is there a recognised path from sketch up to oblivio yet?

  • Richard Gatti says:

    nice sample. you might want to look at some of the available mods for oblivion – immersive interface for example enables you to turn off the HUD completely, making it look slightly less incongorous in London…
    is there a recognised path from sketch up to oblivio yet?

  • Andy says:

    Thanks for the post, I’ll take a look at the other mods, esp to turn off the HUD.

    At the moment we are going from Sketchup to Max and then to Oblivion. As soon as we find a route direct from SketchUp we will put up a post 🙂

    Andy

  • Anonymous says:

    this is really fantastic, have you tried creating interactive environments with the engine… let say openning doors or activating actions that occur within the environment?

  • Anonymous says:

    I suggest dropping an eye onto the Armed Assault engine (armedassault.com). It seems quite potent, with a huge territory size (400 km2), real time day-night & weather cycle, and data streaming capability, not to mention it will be highly modable, just like its predecessor, Operation Flashpoint.

  • Anonymous says:

    Hello, you can use the
    TM (Toggle Menus)
    command to switch off the HUD and, if you’re looking for effects like playing with the time scale, you can use
    set timescale to X
    Where X is an integer value : 1 is realtime at greater values, the time will switch from day to night very fast 🙂

    Jérémie

  • Anonymous says:

    you talk about the 20pounds game engine. But if used commercially I think the costs will be a lot higher. Don’t know what is in the license agreement of oblivion? But it will only be interesting for architects to use it in house, that’s why the quest for an easy path to the game engine is so important. I see good use for it in early design stages, not so in presentation to clients (costs!)

  • Anonymous says:

    I have tried to find how to purchase the Oblivion engine, but cannot find any details. Does anyone know how this can be done?

    Please let me know if you have any deatils and for $20 surely this cannot be correct.

    Paul

  • Andy says:

    Hi Anon..

    You can order it from our Reading/Hardware link in the top right on the blog..

    If you order it – it comes with the Elder Scrolls Construction Set.. Drop us a email if you need any help – asmith@geog.ucl.ac.uk

    All the best,

    Andy

  • Anonymous says:

    Andy

    Thanks for the help, is it easy to import objects from Max into Oblivion?

    Do you know if you would ahve to licence it to use professionaly and if so how much would it be and how could i go about inquiring about this?

    Thanks

    Paul

  • Andy says:

    Paul,

    We found it easy (ish).. I’ll do a post with a step by step guide. Their a few hoops to jump through but its no where near as difficult as Half Life 2.

    In terms of license, the game is meant to be modified so i guess it depends what you using it for. If its for in house demonstrations it might be ok – after all thats what ‘mods’ are..

    Andy

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