Architectural Visualisation Archives - Digital Urban

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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Augmented Reality City Table Top – Unity, CityEngine and Vufoira

Andy — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 15:00:24 +0000

The Vuforia AR Extension for Unity allows developers to build AR apps using the cross-platform game engine – Unity. Working with both the free and pro versions of Unity, Vuforia is not only free it is also one of the best out there in terms of tracking and image based tagging.

Table Top AR City

Running on either iOS/Android or direct via a webcam it allows the integration of other Unity assets into scenes. As such you can create a table top digital city complete with agents all linked to an image based marker and running as a native iOS app:

We will be exploring this further over coming weeks, it opens up a lot of possibilities for augmenting city models (and office desks) with urban data visualisations via custom made iOS/Android apps….

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Lumion 3 – ESRI CityEngine and Autodesk 3D Max

Andy — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 09:35:39 +0000

Lumion is one of the best rapid visualisation systems out there for architectural style rendering. Its ease of use and ability to create scenes complete with advanced sky and lighting effects make it perfect for urban visualisation. With the release of version 3 we thought we would take the free version for a test run.

Lumion 3 fbx Import

The scene below was created using a mix of CityEngine by ESRI and Autodesk’s 3D Studio Max, exported via .fbx. The movie took 8hrs to render at 1080p, 30 frames per second and depth of focus / advanced sky effects:
Lumion 3.0 has notably changed its watermarking on any output – the Lumion Free Not for Commercial Use is not easy to mistake, this is a change to the previous version that had a small banner in the top left hand corner. We can see the reasons why – the previous version could simply be cropped to take out the water mark – but as its on screen the whole time, even in the editor, it does make the work flow painful on the eyes.
With the addition of new video textures, updated sky effects, global illumination and new models Lumion is well worth a look…

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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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404 Festival Taiwan 2010 Viz

Andy — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 16:10:00 +0000

The 404 Festival Taiwan 2010 / Official Spot film investigates the genesis of a world created from information where success and failure becomes layered into an evolving urban landscape:

404 Festival Taiwan 2010 / Official Spot from 404 Festival on Vimeo.

Created by Nice Shoes, and in their own words – the city is not designed through intentional desires, but rather by the proliferation of ideas and thus equating failure with success, each becomes their own thread in a tapestry of an evolving construct.

We are not sure what that means either, but the visualisation is impressive as is the soundscape created for the clip. We do not often delve into sound here at digital urban, but this clip needs headphones, the spatial separation and mix are notable.

The 404 at the end is also rather lovely…

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404 Festival Taiwan 2010 Viz

Andy — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 16:10:00 +0000

The 404 Festival Taiwan 2010 / Official Spot film investigates the genesis of a world created from information where success and failure becomes layered into an evolving urban landscape:

404 Festival Taiwan 2010 / Official Spot from 404 Festival on Vimeo.

The 404 at the end is also rather lovely…

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Architectural Viz: Transitions between Real and Virtual, Shopping City Sued

Andy — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 10:06:00 +0000

Produced by Telegram71 and commisioned by Atp Architekten Ingenieure, the video below shows a possible future renovation of the Shopping City Sued, a shopping mall extending for nearly 2 km in the periphery of Vienna. The insertion of 3d modeled and rendered sequences into on site shootings gives a clear idea of the transition between the actual stage and the future development:

Central to the visualisation are the transitions between real world and rendered, we especially like the staircase sequence 3 minutes into the clip. Its not easy to make a clip based around a shopping centre interesting, but Telegram71 seem to of pulled it off.

Head over to http://www.telegram71.com/ for more examples.

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Architectural Viz: Transitions between Real and Virtual, Shopping City Sued

Andy — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 10:06:00 +0000

Head over to http://www.telegram71.com/ for more examples.

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deformations

Andy — Sat, 10 Apr 2010 17:18:00 +0000

Viralata produced the movie below as a test working on 3D architectural design with Blender.He started to study how to use modifiers to get a shape that adapts automatically to the floors, adding the ability to “sculpt” the building easily and see the result.

déformations from Viralata on Vimeo.
The music is from Nikila: jamendo.com/fr/artist/nikila

Despite only being a test, we rather like it…

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deformations

Andy — Sat, 10 Apr 2010 17:18:00 +0000

déformations from Viralata on Vimeo.
The music is from Nikila: jamendo.com/fr/artist/nikila

Despite only being a test, we rather like it…

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