Archive notice: This article was originally published on April 21, 2008. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
High-quality 3D depictions of buildings and interiors with camera moves have now become standard. Despite increasingly powerful computers, however, this still involves considerable computational effort.
Realistic-looking rendering methods such as Global Illumination and Radiosity also require a great deal of experience when it comes to settings. In addition, some of these methods are heavily optimised for particular camera angles and positions and can therefore tend to flicker or generate image noise in animations. We are still some way from displaying images of such high quality in real time, although there are interesting approaches in this area too, as Bunkspeed’s HyperShot software (www.bunkspeed.com) demonstrates, for example.
Modern game engines, that is, development environments for computer games, offer a good mix of high-quality still images or linear animations and an interactive component. These programs have good interfaces to common 3D programs and offer all the functions needed to manipulate 3D objects or cameras interactively out of the box. In this way, even without much background knowledge, it is very easy to generate interactive walkthroughs, for example, which can be useful for architectural visualisations.
One possible pipeline between Cinema 4D and the Unity 3D game engine (www.unity3d.com) is therefore presented in this workshop. However, any other common 3D software capable of baking textures can also be used.
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