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

Switching between cameras


While previous examples always used a single camera, apart from the mini-map, you can dynamically change cameras using scripts. You could modify their Depth parameters, so another camera is drawn above the others, but you could also toggle their state. In a more elaborate setup, you could switch between different cameras, for example from first person to third person perspective or to a dedicated Point-of-View (POV) camera to display a particular viewpoint. It is also a way to toggle between user-driven navigation and a pre-animated camera. The following steps show how to perform this:

  1. Prepare your scene with a few camera objects created and positioned in different places. Ensure that only one camera has an active Audio Listener component, to avoid warnings in the console log.

  2. Create a new C# script and name it switchCamera. Add a public variable, cameraList, to contain a list of available cameras, using an array. An index variable is used to keep track of which camera...