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

Triggering doors and elevators


We will now write a simple script that is directly applicable in our example project and extend it afterwards to be more generic and reusable, using parameters.

Doors and elevators are typical interactive elements in buildings. Most buildings have no other moving parts. To rotate a door manually or to use scripting is not that different. However, there are a few tricks to get it correct. These are as follows:

  1. Create a plane GameObject, positioned in the origin. Add a simple Cube, and name it DoorLeaf. Set its position to X=1, Y=1.5, Z=0 and scale to X=2, Y=3, Z=0.1. This ensures that the lower side corner of the door leaf is sitting in the center or our scene.

  2. Load the local documentation from the menu by navigating to Help | Scripting Reference, which opens your default browser on the starting page of the locally installed Unity documentation, which is also accessible offline. On the first page there is a small menu to choose the language of all examples (JavaScript...