Best time to get my Unity book & video for $5 each

As you may know, I have published my official Unity tutorials as a book and video with Packt Publishing. If you want to order any of them (or any other book or video from the Packt Catalog for that matter), now is a good time. Till the 6th of January 2015, every single item in the catalog is $5 only!

Here are the direct links to my own publications...

Unity video-tutorial for interactive architectural visualisation

https://www.packtpub.com/hardware-and-creative/building-architectural-walkthrough-using-unity-video

Translating CAD or BIM models into a real-time application can seem a tiresome ordeal. Luckily, Unity is very accessible for architects with some 3D experience and it makes importing and presenting models a fun task to do. Architectural visualization through Unity will help you analyze designs and make related decisions even before the actual building is built.

Starting from 3D models in common architectural software, we will discuss the workflow to load the models into Unity and even incorporate model changes. The building model will be refined, with better materials and lighting, so it looks attractive to the visitor. With a few basic scripts, we add the necessary interactivity and finally export it into an application you can share.

This video tutorial shows an efficient and easy approach to apply an architectural 3D model into your project for quick and reliable results.

Unity book for interactive architectural visualisation

https://www.packtpub.com/game-development/unity-architectural-visualization

This book is written for students and professional architects who know how to model buildings in 3D and have a need to turn their design into an interactive model, even if you have never used Unity before. Experience with visualization and programming will be helpful, but is not required to follow along. You will learn all the basics throughout with the help of step-by-step examples. The majority of the examples work fine in any recent version of the Unity software, on Windows or Mac, but occasionally features of the Pro version are required.

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Improve usage of BIM during early design phases

When I was collecting ideas for a book chapter on BIM (that seemed to never have emerged after that), I collected 10 ideas, which I believe still reflect good recommendations to improve the usage of BIM during the early design phases. These ideas are related to BIM software, but you can apply them in any flavor, as long as you can model with Building Elements, Spaces and have control over representation. Introduction This article gives an overview of several recommendations and tips, to better apply BIM applications and BIM methodologies, in the context of the early design phases. Many of these tips are applicable in any BIM application and they are based on experience gathered from teaching, researching and using BIM software. Sometimes they could help software developers to improve the workflow of their particular BIM implementation. Tip 1 : Gradually increase the amount of information In the early design phases, the architect makes assumptions and lays out the main design in...

Getting BIM data into Unity (Part 0 - Introduction)

This post reflects on work that I carried out, elaborated during my guidance of a few Master thesis students, to better integrate BIM models into Unity. This will be a multi-part post. This makes each article a bit shorter to read, but allows more in-depth information overall. Hope you like it. Please comment with feedback and further improvements. Basic methodology Unity can import geometry from FBX and Collada (DAE) files primarily. There are a few other formats, but these are the preferred ones. When integrating CAD or BIM files into a realtime environment, you have to convert the geometry. During my Unity teaching and the writing of the book Unity for Architectural Visualization ( buy from Packt ), I’ve come up with a basic diagram explaining geometry exchange between CAD and BIM software and Unity. Throughout these posts, we’ll go more into detail. We start with ArchiCAD, but will tackle Revit in a follow-up post. Promised!

PythonOCC : Open Source interactive CAD shell (and how to run it on OSX)

What is PythonOCC? PythonOCC is an Open Source (LGPL) Python-wrapper for OpenCASCADE. So what is OpenCASCADE (OCC)? This is an advanced Open Source (custom license) modeling kernel, comparable to commercial engines, such as ACIS or Parasolid, which are used in quite some commercial CAD programs. When you want to develop CAD software, you could use OCC and write programs in C++. And why using Python? With this wrapper, you can create CAD and geometry scripts in Python, which is an interpreted Object-oriented scripting language. You can write almost "on-the-fly" and seriously reduce the implementation effort, by skipping the compiling-phase. You can even interact with a running program in the Python interpreter. Want to read more about this? The OpenCASCADE official website (currently Linux and Windows are officially supported) The PythonOCC website/blog (beware that the core of the actions happen in the development repositories). So far so good. Now the nasty, techn...

CAD, BIM & 3D

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