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

Basic heads-up-display with a custom GUI


When we explained the use of GUIText and GUITexture components in Chapter 4, Promenade Architecturale, they were static. This is fine for a fixed logo, but not when you need dynamic information. You can script these components, but they are not the most efficient ones to use. This is shown in the following code:

public Texture2D someTexture;
...
guiText.text = "Hello";
guiTexture.texture = someTexture;

An alternative is the use of the Unity Graphical User Interface (GUI) classes. To display a GUI inside a script in Unity, use the OnGUI() event. This runs independently of the regular Update() cycle. Inside this event, you can display buttons, text labels, sliders, panels, scroll areas, textures, and toggle switches.

We illustrate this with a simple GUI script that displays the name of the trigger we enter, as shown in the following screenshot, which also displays some feedback in the console.

The following steps will show how to set up a simple scene...