3D Max Archives - Digital Urban

Particles – 3dsMax and Lumion/Unity

Andy — Mon, 01 Sep 2014 10:43:24 +0000

Particle Flow is a versatile, powerful particle system for Autodesk’s 3ds Max. It employs an event-driven model, using a special dialog called Particle View, allowing you to combine individual operators that describe particle properties such as shape, speed, direction, and rotation over a period of time into groups called events. Each operator provides a set of parameters, many of which you can animate to change particle behaviour during the event. As the event transpires, Particle Flow continually evaluates each operator in the list and updates the particle system accordingly.

pFlow 3ds Max

To achieve more substantial changes in particle properties and behaviour, you can create a flow. The flow sends particles from event to event using tests, which let you wire events together in series. A test can check, for example, whether a particle has passed a certain age, how fast it’s moving, or whether it has collided with a deflector. Particles that pass the test move on to the next event, while those that don’t meet the test criteria remain in the current event, possibly to undergo other tests. The simple example pictured above details a pFlow dialogue determining the birth of particles linked to a target geometry. The particles can subsequently be baked (using pFlow Baker) into an animation timeline for simple output via .fbx, allowing import into external systems such as Unity or Lumion.

The clip above illustrates the pFlow system imported into Lumion with the addition of a scene created in CityEngine.

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The Making of the CASA Oculus Rift Urban Roller Coaster

Andy — Tue, 26 Aug 2014 14:48:54 +0000

Earlier this year CASA was invited to create a virtual reality exhibit for the Walking on Water exhibition, partnered with Grand Designs Live at London’s ExCeL. While CASA has a tendency to spend a lot of time thinking seriously about cities and data it was quickly decided that a fun and novel way to engage the 100,000 or so expected visitors would be an urban roller coaster ride using the Oculus Rift Virtual Reality headset. Oliver Dawkins, a student on our MRes in Advanced Spatial Analysis is a leading light in urban visualisation and the Oculus Rift, as such he kindly offered to lead the development. In the following guest post, Oliver (of http://virtualarchitectures.wordpress.com/) talks us through the development process….

CASA Urban Roller Coaster from Virtual Architectures on Vimeo.The first tool chosen for this project was the Unity game engine because it provides a very simple means of integrating the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset into a real-time 3D experience. Initial tests were made in Unity with a pre-made roller coaster model downloaded from the Unity Asset Store. However, rather than simply place that roller coaster in an urban setting I wanted to create a track that would be unique to this experience and feel like it might have been part of the urban infrastructure. Due to time constraints it was not possible to model the urban scene from scratch. Instead I decided to generate it procedurally in Autodesk 3ds MAX using a great free script called ghostTown Lite.

Although I like to use SketchUp for 3D modelling wherever possible 3ds MAX was much better suited to this project as it allowed me to quickly generate the city scene, model the roller coaster track, and animate the path of the ride, all in the one software package. After generating the urban scene I used the car from the Asset Store roller coaster as a guide for modelling my track in the correct proportions.

The path of the ride through the city was modeled using Bezier splines, first in the Top view to get the rough layout and then in the Front and Left views to ensure the path would clear the buildings in my scene. The experience needed to be comfortable to users who may not have experienced virtual reality before so it was agreed to exclude loop-the-loops on this occasion. It was also important to avoid bends that would be too sharp for roller coaster to realistically follow. Once I was happy with the path I welded all the vertices in my splines so that the path could be used to animate the movement of the roller coaster car along the track later.

Next sections of track were added to the path I’d created using the 3ds MAX PathDeform (WSM) modifier. As the name suggests this modifier deforms selected geometry to follow a chosen path. Using this modifier massively simplified the process by allowing my pre-made sections of track to be offset along the length of the path and then stretched, rotated and twisted to fit together as seamlessly as possible. This was the most intricate and time consuming part of the project.

In order to minimise the the potential for motion sickness with the Oculus Rift I was careful to keep the rotation of the track as close to the horizontal plane as possible. Supporting struts were then arrayed along the path of the track and positioned in order to anchor it to the rest of the scene. When I was satisfied a ‘Snapshot’ was made of the geometry in 3ds MAX to create a single mesh ready for export to Unity. At this point the path deformed sections of track could be deleted as Unity does not recognise the modifier.

To create the movement of the roller coaster car along the track a 3ds MAX dummy helper was constrained to the path I’d created earlier. This generated starting and ending key frames on the animation timeline. The roller coaster car model was then placed on the track and linked to the dummy helper. It is possible in 3ds Max to have the velocity and banking of the dummy calculated automatically, but I found that this did not give a realistic feel. Instead I controlled both by editing the animation key frames using a camera linked to the dummy for reference. This was time intensive but gave a better result. The city scene, roller coaster and animation were exported as a single FBX which is the preferred import format for 3D geometry in Unity.

Having completed the track and animated the car it was time to assemble the final scene in Unity. First I generated a terrain using a great plugin called World Composer. This enables you to import satellite imagery and terrain heights from Bing maps to give your backdrops a high degree of realism.

The urban scene and roller coaster were then imported and a skybox and directional light were added. The scene was completed with various assets from the Unity Asset Store including skyscrapers, roof objects, vehicles, idling characters and a flock of birds.

To prepare the Oculus Rift integration the OVR camera controller asset from Oculus was placed inside and parented to the roller coaster car. In my initial tests with the Asset Store roller coaster I’d found that OVR camera would drift from the forward facing position. This would disorientate the user and contribute to motion sickness. To prevent it with a quick fix I parented a cube to the front of the roller coaster car, turned off rendering of the cube so it would be invisible, and set the camera controller to follow the cube.

In order to ensure the best possible virtual experience it is really important to keep the rendered frames per second as high as possible. As the Oculus Rift renders two cameras simultaneously, one for each eye, you need to aim to render 60 fps in Unity so as to ensure the user can expect to experience a frame rate of 30 fps.
In order to achieve this I took advantage of occlusion culling in Unity Pro which prevents objects being rendered when they are outside the camera’s field of view or obscured by other objects.

I also baked the shadows for all static objects in the scene to save them as textures which saves the processor calculating them dynamically. The only objects casting dynamic shadows are the roller coaster car and animated characters.
Finally two simple java scripts were added. The first would start the roller coaster and play a roller coaster sound file upon pressing the ‘S’ key. The second closed the roller coaster application upon pressing the ‘Esc’ key.
The reception of the CASA Urban Roller Coaster ride at Grand Designs Live was fantastic and I’m really pleased to have participated. It was a great project to work on and an excellent opportunity to learn new techniques in 3ds MAX and Unity. Having my first VR roller coaster under my belt I’m looking forward to building another truly terrifying one when I get the time, hopefully for the Oculus Rift DK2 which has just arrived at CASA.
On a last note I’d like to thank Tom Hoffman of Lake Earie Digital whose excellent YouTube tutorials on creating roller coasters in 3ds MAX provided a great guide through the most difficult part of this challenging project.
You can follow Oliver’s latest work at http://virtualarchitectures.wordpress.com/…..

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3DMax 2014 – Populate – Rapid Crowds in 3D Scenes

Andy — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 09:21:14 +0000

Regular readers will know that we are big fans of 3D Max here at digital urban. The up and coming 2014 version has a notable feature for anyone interested in urban visualisation – the ability to add crowds to scenes.

Example Screen Grab of Populate in 3D Max 2014

One of our uses of 3D Max is for agent based modelling, specifically using the Crowd and Delegate System – see (ABM, SketchUp, ArcGIS and Lumion for an example movie). The addition of crowds however has always proved more difficult, especially directly within 3D Max. The new Populate section of 3D Max 2014 aims to address this and it looks impressive, the movie below provides an insight:
3D MAx 2014 should be released anytime soon (we cant seem to track down an exact date), as ever all students get free access and we will be integrating Populate into our Masters Degree next year…

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Mega City One – Greeble and After Effects

Andy — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 10:55:34 +0000

Greeble is a quick and easy way to create large scale sci-fi cityscapes – using our previous tutorials on Building a Greeble Skyscraper and Creating a Greeble City it is possible to create a scene in under an hour.

Mega City One using Greeble

Martin Miroľa has used a mix of the Greeble plugin in 3D Max and After Effects to create an impressive ‘Mega City’,the movie below also includes a breakdown, detailing how it was created:
Nicely made…

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CASA Cubes in the City

Andy — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 14:07:50 +0000

As part of a future ‘Easter’ themed promotion we have produced a short teaser clip around ‘cubes in the city’.

The movie was produced using ESRI City Engine, 3D Max and Lumion – it is also being used as part of our Masters course on Advanced Spatial Analysis and Visualisation to demonstrate how simulation (MassFX) can be combined with procedural city creation and rapid visualisation…

Lumion has a few issues with lighting – there are some errors in the movie above – however for work created and rendered in under 3 hours its worth living with…

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London’s Twitter Island – From ArcGIS to Max to Lumion

Andy — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 10:32:00 +0000

As part of the MRes in Advanced Spatial Analysis and Visualisation, here in CASA at The Bartlett, University College London, we are exploring new methods and techniques for visualising data. As part of the course we are looking at collecting data from the Twitter API and using the resulting .csv file as an input into a variety of software, including Processing and ArcMap.
One such known example is the London Twitter map by UrbanTick, developed using the data collector created by Steven Gray and imported by Fabian into ArcMap, it developed a style of its own as the ‘NewCity Landscape’ collection. From a digital urban point of view the next stage of the map is a 3D extension, a transformation that proved surprisingly difficult due to the nature of combining the worlds of traditional GIS and game engines such as Lumion.
We are still in the early stages of development but the movie below illustrates the NewCity Landscape Map of London visualisation in Lumion as a ‘Twitter Island’:

Music by Pigeman over at MP3 Unsigned. There are of course many arguments on the pro’s and con’s of visualising data in such a way, indeed the visualisation is developed to open up the debate as part of the MRes course allowing various visualisation techniques to be compared from the same data set.
We will have more updates as the visualisation develops, along with a walk through of how to build it. If your interested in such output our MRes is now open for applications, entry 2012-2013…

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Lumion, Unity, Agents & Objects

Andy — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 12:01:00 +0000

Crowd, transport and urban simulations are at their roots down to ‘Agents’ or ‘Objects’ that are assigned a set of rules as to how to moves in relation to both the environment and other agents around them. 3D Studio Max has a built in ‘Crowd and Delegate’ system which can be used to assign behaviour and therefore create realistic traffic of pedestrian systems in 3D space.
The movie below displays our first tentative steps to explore emergent behaviour via the introduction of simple rules. The movie starts out with a basic ‘wander’ behaviour where the agents only knowledge is the shape of the surface. Moving on we assign each of our ‘cubes’ (of which we have become quite fond of…) a level of vision so they can see ahead and therefore avoid each other and objects in their environment.

Crowd and Delegates – Emergent Behaviour from digitalurban on Vimeo.

Thirdly, the agents seek a ‘sphere’ which could be viewed as a source of food. While being aware of each other and tweaking the way the cubes move a swarm behaviour emerges. Finally, we introduce competing groups with two priorities, firstly to eat and secondly to stay as a group. The majority choose the group over the food but a couple stray off in search of sustenance and lose the other members.

Previous steps in our visualisation of agent based models are based around a simple flocking examples. This model is an attempt to mimic the flocking of birds, while the resulting motion also resembles schools of fish. The flocks that appear in this model are not created or led in any way by special leader rather, each bird is following exactly the same set of rules, from which flocks emerge.
We have exported the model into 3D Max providing the visualisation below, as ever these are early days but the results seem to run well with 300 ‘birds’ over 1000 frames. The birds are rendered as cubes at the moment for proof of concept:

Flocking in NetLogo exported to 3D Max from digitalurban on Vimeo.
Music “Funkmelon Blooz” (Electronica)
The birds follow three rules: “alignment”, “separation”, and “cohesion”. “Alignment” means that a bird tends to turn so that it is moving in the same direction that nearby birds are moving. “Separation” means that a bird will turn to avoid another bird which gets too close. “Cohesion” means that a bird will move towards other nearby birds (unless another bird is too close). When two birds are too close, the “separation” rule overrides the other two, which are deactivated until the minimum separation is achieved.
The three rules affect only the bird’s heading. Each bird always moves forward at the same constant speed.
If we were using the built in Crowd and Delegate system a true 3D flocking system would be possible, but it would be pure visualisation, by importing via NetLogo you gain access to the raw data and thus spatial analysis is possible. It is also quick to model and provides the best of both worlds – 3d visualisation and complex modelling.
While 3D Max is of use for crowd and particle simulation when it comes to modelling complex systems an external package is required, such as NetLogo. The movie below details our first steps at CASA (home of digital urban) to export a basic traffic model from NetLogo into 3D Studio Max. The import script was written by our new PhD student, Ateen Patel and opens up a vast array of opportunities to both visualise and model the city.

Music by The Tedd-Z Cookbook, Aerodrome (Funky Shuffle Remix)
NetLogo is a cross-platform multi-agent programmable modeling environment that is widely. It is particularly well suited for modeling complex systems developing over time. Modelers can give instructions to hundreds or thousands of independent “agents” all operating concurrently. This makes it possible to explore the connection between the micro-level behavior of individuals and the macro-level patterns that emerge from the interaction of many individuals.(Nation Master Encyclopedia).
How does this relate to the city? The next part is to put in real geographical data and to get the agents movies and reacting to each other on a spatial network, more on that to come. Perhaps using a particle system as per the movie below:
Particles in the City from digitalurban on Vimeo.All of these models are going into our exhibition space to allow a step by step guide to the principles of agent based modelling. At the moment we are weighing up two options – Unity and Lumion. Our previous trials in Unity are below:
Unity is great, it is a fully featured game engine, however we are also looking at Lumion. Lumion, aimed more at direct visualization, is remarkably easy to learn, the movie below is the result of our first 20 minutes working with Lumion from first load to final output. It is merely proof of concept, but taking the output from Max and dragging into Lumion is refreshingly simply:
We will have more on Lumion in future posts…

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Procedural Building Generator v0.5 Launched

Andy — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 10:39:00 +0000

Tyson Ibele, over at http://tysonibele.com/ has released the latest version of his Building Generator for 3D Max 9 and above. Development has been swift with the addition of textures a couple of weeks ago and now a notable update to the creation of windows/details on the buildings.

With the creation of digital cities the ‘detail’ is crucial, from shutters on windows to lights and blinds, they all add up to create a sense of place. We have not had chance to run the latest version yet as its just been released, but if its anything like the previous iterations it is one of the ‘must’ have scripts for building digital cities.

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Free Procedural Buildings Generator – Now with Textures

Andy — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 14:04:00 +0000

The procedural buildings generator from http://www.tysonibele.com/ has eaten up quite a lot of our free time in the week since its was released. With updates coming thick and fast it now includes automatic texture creation complete with an included texture pack.

If digital urban gave out awards, this plugin would win a big shiny gold one, fantastic stuff and so refreshing to see this level of quality without an equally high price tag.

Head over to http://www.tysonibele.com/ for the download.

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Free Procedural Buildings Generator Released for 3D Max

Andy — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 08:44:00 +0000

Procedural building generators are few are far between so when one comes along that is not only powerful but also free it is well worth our attention. Tyson Ibele, over at http://tysonibele.com/ has released version 1.5 of his Building Generator for 3D Max 9 and above.

The clip below provides a glimpse of its output:

We are going to give it a spin later today – you can download Building Generator free via: www.tysonibele.com.

Thanks go to Karel Airapetjan for emailing us in the link.

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