Book Image

Unity for Architectural Visualization

By : Stefan Boeykens
Book Image

Unity for Architectural Visualization

By: Stefan Boeykens

Overview of this book

Architects have always relied on drawings, renderings, and sometimes even movies to present their design concepts to clients, contractors, and other stakeholders. The accessibility of current game engines provides new and exciting possibilities to turn any design into an interactive model that anyone can experience at their own pace. "Unity for Architectural Visualization" explains how you can create compelling, real-time models from your 3D architectural project. Filled with practical tips and in-depth information, this book explains every step in the process, starting from the very basics up to custom scripts that will get you up to the next level. This book begins with a general overview of the Unity workflow for architectural models. You will start with a simple project that lets you walk around in your design using basic Unity tools and methods. You will then learn how to easily get convincing lightning effects on your scene. You will then set up a basic navigation system in your project, and not only this; you will also cover some tips and tricks to take navigation to the next level. You will quickly learn how to fine-tune the shaders and how to set up materials that are a bit more advanced. Even when you finish Unity for Architectural Visualization, this book will make scripting easier with reusable examples of scripts that can be applied in most projects. After reading this book, you will be comfortable enough to tackle new projects and develop your own.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Unity for Architectural Visualization
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Assets and the Unity workflow


Unity was developed in the context of game development and provides an efficient integration into existing pipelines, independent of the used modeling and content creation software. Regardless if the team consists of you alone or you are part of a large group of designers, developers, artists, and technical directors, you need to get your workflow up and running to be efficient. This is equally relevant for architectural offices, which are also organized around long-running projects where different people interact and collaborate, using a variety of software applications for drafting, modeling, and presentations.

Inside Unity, you create a project, which is stored inside a single folder on your hard disc. Within the project folder, there are a wide variety of folders and files, which are mostly regulated in the background by Unity. The Assets folder is where all your files are stored that you need to manage directly, such as models, scripts, textures, and scene files. There is a direct relation between what you see inside the Unity project panel and what occurs as files in your local file system.

Unity also supports additional modules that facilitate the technical aspects of collaboration, for example, by setting the project up with the Asset Server system or by tuning the project metadata (the information about each file) into separate meta-files, that are better suited for version control systems (VCS), such as Subversion or Git. While such systems are common with software development, they are not widely used in architectural projects. They present an opportunity to share projects between different users, computers, and systems. Using a version control system with Unity, team members can check out files in the project and receive changes from other members. This is more efficient than copying the whole large project folder back and forth since only changes need to be synced. Only the Assets and ProjectSettings folders need to be synced; other folders are generated locally. More information on using external version control systems with Unity can be found at http://docs.unity3d.com/Documentation/Manual/ExternalVersionControlSystemSupport.html, the official Unity documentation website.