Vladymi, an architect from Ukraine, got in contact to let us know that as a result of some of our blog posts he has decided to move almost entirely to game engines for visualisation.
His current ‘engine’ of choice is the CryEngine2:
See the ArchMod site for more details.
The CryEngine is awesome but last I checked the licensing cost for the Crytek engine was $1,000,000. Pretty significant barrier to entry.
It’s a pity the example is of an American-style gated community with twee houses.
Yes itd be nice to know how Vladymi negated the commercial licensing fees? Or is he uber-rich?
You DON’T need CryEngine 2 to do this kind of viz all you need is copy of Crysis and Crysis SDK witch is freely available for non-commercial purposes(witch is why this project is non-commercial, means I didn’t get paid for that). For commercial viz I use Unity.
soon you wont need CryEngine for realtime rendering check out (therenderingkiller.com)
Oh i love it. The visuals are stunning and the walking people and flying birds are giving the scene a “sense of life” A truly great and inspiring work 🙂
Have you looked into using UDK? Their licensing for commercial use seems very fair, and use of it for non-commercial learning and development is free.
My opinion:
1.UDK doesn’t have such quality of real-time lightning as CryEngine has. It has no differed lightning. It has weak Screen Space Ambient Occlusion.
2.UDK is not so user friendly as Unity is. But it does have a better graphics.
3.UDK supports only PC. No Web, no Mac. CryEngine does not support them either 🙁
4.I don’t think royalty is very fair. Unity has a fixed price and no royalty.
Well UDK does have few advantages, but that’s another story. By the way I was a Big Unreal Engine fan few years ago.
Next year, Crytek will release their version of “free” engine. Will have a look at it. And Unity 3 is out already…
I know a french team they use CryEngine 2 for visualisation : Enodo (ex ImagTP, http://www.enodo.fr).
They work with Crytek since 2004 for urban, architectural and design viz.
chesscrate .. true also check out Lumion (formerly Slicex 3D) from the makers or Quest 3d..
» http://lumion3d.com/
Being involved in game industry for a while, I might tell you, that I know a lot of real-time technologies out there including some open-source projects. Shiva 3d, Cult 3d, Ogre, DXstudio, Espirient creator, Panda 3d. As for simple visualisation tools (same as Lumion) checkout Twinmotion (therenderingkiller.com).