From DB Bailey (David Denton, AIA)
July 3, 2009
We’ve been back from Egypt several weeks now. The preliminary construction documents are being completed at PUD Consultants’ office in Cairo. I’ve been getting up very early in the morning to have two or three hours of overlapping work day to meet with the Egyptian architects in avatar form. For the most part this has worked well, except for the time difference.
We have submitted a proposal to the client to complete the construction of the virtual model in SL but have not yet received a response. There are many possibilities about how this model could be used to promote the project. Not only would he be able to take interested parties on a tour of the project but he could also use the retail space for virtual displays of his ceramic products. We hope to receive a go-ahead soon. The design of the hotel and office building are on hold like every other project in the world.
We recently were asked by the client to provide architectural renderings of the project to be submitted to the Ministry of PublicWorks, along with the drawings for government approval. The question was whether we could obtain quality architectural renderings from a Second Life build that would be as good as another 3d modeling program such as 3d max, which we normally use.
Shown here are three renderings from snapshots of the SL model, with people inserted using Photoshop. These renderings are different stylistically from what would be produced with other 3d modeling programs but in my opinion are of sufficient quality compared to 3d max renderings.
The most difficult part about producing architectural renderings from a Second Life model is lighting. As all of us who have tried have found, it is difficult to control the lighting to create realism. We came to the realization that we would never get the realism that we could with other 3d modeling programs and that these would be stylistically unique to SL. For some applications, these renderings may be too stylistic, but we concluded that it was possible to create a unique and appealing SL style.
We would be very interested in seeing other peoples’ architectural renderings done from an SL model. One problem we had was finding texture maps of Egyptian people, particularly women in headscarves, to use in Photoshop. In fact, we found only one source in Turbosquid for the outrageous amount of $70.00 only to realize that the images were Indonesians. A little doctoring in Photoshop did the trick. There’s a market out there for texture maps of people of various cultures.
