CAD, BIM & 3D

I have recently completed a video course on the use of Unity in architectural visualisation. This course has almost 3 hours of content and is available from Packt Publishing. More information and ordering Some words about what I find important in this course (and I'm seriously biased, as the author). Small, easy-to-digest modules Starting from the provided templates, I was tasked to follow a very strict format: small videos of about 3 to 5 minutes, 5 videos in a section and 8 sections in total. There was also a quite strict content format to follow: title, content, actual tutorial section (including problem and solution) and than a summary in the end. While this restricts a bit the amount of information you can cram into the timeslot, it ensures that the learning outcomes are clear and focused. On the plus side, the educational quality of the end result improved considerably. On the minus side, the amount of topics that could be handled and their depth was limited. It...

You may have noticed that I'm interested in Unity. Here is another post about this fascinating game engine. Unity eBooks on offer for $5 There is of course my own book " Unity for Architectural Visualization " ( http://bit.ly/17u87df ). I you act quick, you can even buy it at a great discount, since Packt offers all eBooks and video courses for $5 till Jan. 3d ( http://bit.ly/1jdCr2W  ). I can recommend the  Unity Game Development Essentials  book by Will Goldstone as a general introduction and the  Unity 4.x Cookbook  as a series of valuable little tricks and tips once you know how to use C# in Unity. Unity for Architectural Visualization as a Video Tutorial? I'm currently working on a video course on the same subject . Will be still at an introductory level, though. Will be announced later. Further advancing interactive architecture projects I do hope to make a sequel on a more elaborate level as well. Not sure in which format. Book? Video Course?...

In a surprising but understandable move, you can temporarily register for a free (basic) license for Unity3D and add the iOS and Android Basic licenses without cost. While the Pro version of Unity3D and the additional licenses of the mobile addons are still about $1500 each, the creation of smartphone and tablet apps has finally been more accessible than ever. For Android apps you need only the additional Java and Android SDK, but it runs on Windows and OSX. Linux is supported for these SDKs but not Unity3D (yet?). For iOS apps (iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch), you need a Mac with OSX and an Intel CPU. While you can prototype a full app and remote control it using your iDevice, you need a non-free iOS developer license, which is $99/year for individual developers. What's the catch? This offer is only till 8th of April and the basic versions lack some of the features of the pro versions, but they are very complete and can be used commercially! Choose your license (and cur...

The Virtual Building Explorer (originally born as the Zermatt plugin) is an add-on to ArchiCAD to export the 3D Building Model into a realtime model to send to others, without requiring ArchiCAD. You can export the 3D Geometry into a standalone PC or Mac application and include a radiosity-like graphics style, which is not available in ArchiCAD itself. This software was recently updated to version 2 and from now on, educational users (students, teachers, schools) can use the software under the same conditions as the free educational version of ArchiCAD.

If you work with video, from webcams, video cameras or rendered, there are several complex manipulations that can be made a bit easier with some of the free utilities for realtime video editing. The website of artist and developer Zach Poff  has some free applications for download. They are Open Source, but are made in MAX/MSP, which is the commercial counterpart of Puredata. And the applications are only compiled for Mac OSX. Some of the things he presents: Live Video Delay: view your video frames with a delay Chroma Key Live: see a rough estimate of the effect of filming against green (or blue or purple) screen, live Multiscreener: synchronize the playback of movies on different computers Video Trigger: trigger sounds when something happens on certain parts of a video capture ... Some of these functionality could be done in other systems, obviously, but having it in a precompiled utility will make it easier if one of his programs already does what you need. E.g. video in...

“ Sintel ” is an independently produced short film, initiated by the Blender Foundation as a means to further improve and validate the free/open source 3D creation suite Blender . With initial funding provided by 1000s of donations via the internet community, it has again proven to be a viable development model for both open 3D technology as for independent animation film. This 15 minute film has been realized in the studio of the Amsterdam Blender Institute, by an international team of artists and developers. In addition to that, several crucial technical and creative targets have been realized online, by developers and artists and teams all over the world. After " Elephants Dream " and " Big Buck Bunny ", this is the third Open Movie, organized around the promotion and further technological improvement of the full Open Source workflow around the creation of a movie project. The main animation software, Blender, is Open Source, cross-platform and more and more up ...

Just when you thought everything is getting tied into specific platforms, someone started to let the JavaScript version of Processing work on some of the current "hot" devices, such as the iPad and the Android. http://www.jepstone.net/blog/2010/04/16/processing-js-mini-ide-for-ipad-iphone-android-chrome/ Programming on a computer for a handheld device suddenly seems cumbersome. (with thanks to Andrea Graziano from whom I read about this)

I saw this used to announce Python-scripting for Rhino (on OSX and Windows). This is both a webservice and a software tool to quickly assemble a movie with an animated character, which speaks the text you type. The webservice makes it usable directly in the browser, but you have to wait till the movie is rendered on the server. You can customize backgrounds, actors, camera angles, soundtrack... But whenever more people are using it, you will get bored seeing the same scenes again and again. But till then... enjoy.

http://www.3dworldmag.com/page/3dworld?entry=houdini_10_released The new release of Houdini 10 is (luckily) still available in commercial, cheap and free editions, for all major platforms (Windows, OSX and Linux).

After "Elephants Dream" and "Big Buck Bunny", the third Open Movie project tied to the Blender Foundation developments to improve Blender in a real project is announced: http://durian.blender.org/

The cross-platform, Open Source Processing environment has just turned into an official 1.0 release. It is available on all platforms, uses Java and is free to use and to adapt. It can be used for teaching and learning programming, with a strong emphasis on interaction and visualization. You still have to write code, but the treshold has diminished to a very low level, which makes it accessible for many more people than, let's say, C++ or C#, certainly when you are interested in graphics, video, animation, 3D, audio, PDF and all kinds of other things. Highly recommended, but remember that you still have to write code and you need to have a basic understanding about mathematics. And if it's good enough for video clips from Radiohead, TV-commercials, several highly respected universities and visual artists, than it might as well work out for you as well. [sorry for the slightly less objective posting...]

Antics provides a solution to develop realtime animations. It is used for pre-visualization, machinima and general multimedia purposes. There are two versions: free and pro, with different content available and with better integration in the pro version. http://www.antics3d.com Available for Windows only.

When you register and download the evaluation version of PFTrack (PC/MAC/Linux) it will continue to work as a Personal Learning Editio n (although with all exports disabled). You can save your project and work with the full functionality to learn about matchmoving. The commercial version is not cheap, although there is also a student version available. Register for the trial/PLE version This firm also sells a cheap version called PFHoe which is not free (about EUR 50), but is fast and streamlined and can be used in many cases. As an historic aside, the software was originally developed in an academic project, called Icarus , where it was freely available for quite some time.

According to an article from Digit Magazine Adobe will provide students free access to the Flex tools for building Rich Internet Applications, using Flex Builder 2 .

At http://sfx.realviz.com/Autodesk you can download a free tracking plugin for 3ds max or Maya. MMTrack by RealVIZ is temporarily available (untill august 1, 2007) and allows tracking of video footage directly inside the 3d animation software.

http://www.debugmode.com/wax/ "Wax is a high performance and flexible video compositing and special effects software. The idea for Wax is to be very general purpose and flexible in video compositing and effects, so that you can compose your dream video sequence with ease everytime." Een gratis programma (Windows alleen) om video te bewerken. Dit ligt in de lijn van de commerciële programma's Adobe After Effects, Autodesk Combustion en Apple Shake. Dit is geschikt voor het editeren van video, geluid, maar ook met opties voor effecten en het 'layeren' van video. Dit zijn functies die niet beschikbaar zijn in meer traditionele NLE (Non-linear Editors), zoals Adobe Premiere, Sony Vegas en anderen. Op dezelfde site vind je ook WinMorph (voor het vloeiend morphen van video) en Wink (voor het maken van videotutorials, filmpjes die tonen hoe een programma werkt). Allemaal gratis, trouwens. En WinMorph heeft ook een Linux versie.

"ZS4, the new incarnation of Zwei-Stein, is an advanced video editing and compositing program with over 100 built-in video effects. It runs on Windows , Linux and OSX and is free for personal use ." Ik weet niet of je ooit met het vroegere Zwei-Stein gespeeld hebt, maar deze nieuwe versie is wat uitgebreider en iets vriendelijker qua interface. En nog steeds gratis, gelukkig.

digilab homepage Gratis (niet-commercieel) programma voor Linux en Windows voor Camera-tracking: het analyseert een sequens video en reconstrueert de camera-beweging. Dit kan je gebruiken om een video aan te vullen met bijkomende 3D-objecten, bijv. het inpassen van een ontwerp in een film van de omgeving. Vergelijkbaar (qua concept) met dure programma's als Matchmover, Boujou en PFTracker (wat ook ooit begon als academisch onderzoek en toen tijdelijk gratis was onder de naam Icarus...).