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

Meshes and materials, or Shaders


Select the model in the Hierarchy Tab and fold out the small triangle to see the hierarchical outline of parent and child objects. When you select any of the child objects, it usually has a Mesh Filter containing the geometry, a Mesh Renderer, which has shadow settings and a list of assigned materials. For each material there is a separate Materials component, which displays the material properties. This is shown in the following screenshot:

Note

Beware that materials are shared between objects, so adjustments are effective on all objects that reference this material.

Most materials use the basic Diffuse shader or material definition and we will leave them for now. You could tweak the material for glass objects a bit, to emulate something more reflective, but we will look at this in more detail in Chapter 6, Shaders and Textures.

You can adjust the tiling and offset of the material component, but this has effect on every geometric object where this material...