Saturday, August 30, 2008

Game engines as architectural visualization tools



I found this video on http://digitalurban.blogspot.com. It's a video of Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater placed into Valve Software's Source engine. This is a good example of how game engines can be useful for architectural visualization. Imagine letting your client "playtest" their own house!

This has become an exciting new possibility for architects looking to help their clients visualize their own house before it is built. In a conversation with my contact from Valve Software, we discussed Valve's Source engine and their environment creator, Hammer, being used as architecture visualization tools.

Like the levels in a game, this could potentially allow architects and their clients to test their designs and change them accordingly (obviously if used during the correct phase of the design process.)

The video shows a player exploring the house as someone would the regular maps in Half-Life 2, then using the game's passcode console to initiate "noclip" mode, a mode that allows testers to freely explore the map without being limited by the structures of the gamespace, and do a fly-around of the map and see the whole house.

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