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

Using advanced textured materials


While you can go pretty far using the Unity shading language, we will focus on the use of image-based texture maps mostly in architectural visualization. We illustrate this with textures from the Arroway website (http://www.arroway-textures.com/catalog), which are provided commercially in high resolution or can be freely downloaded in low resolution, under a Creative-Commons license (CC-BY, so attribution is required if you apply them in your projects).

  1. Go to the Arroway website and browse to a texture that you like. We opt for bricks 002, which gives a nice weathered brick pattern. You get a preview of how the texture looks when applied to an example.

  2. Note the hints that are provided here: real world size is 6m x 3.4m and the texture is seamless only in the horizontal direction, so you should not repeat it in the upper direction. Download the RAR archive and unpack it. It contains three files: bricks-002_b030.jpg is bump map, hinted at 30% intensity, bricks...