BIM 42

Virtual Environments

Virtual environments are a trending topic among our clients these days. Owners don’t want only pretty pictures of their future building anymore, but also videos, and lately, whole 3D environments.

They want to be able to walk through their future building and see everything just like the expected end user. This kind of easily accessible 3D model has endless applications: You can validate architectural and interior design choices, check the accessibility and the ergonomic of the building, present a show apartment on a web-based application accessible by anyone, and many more…

For the one who were fond of videos games in their youth, it’s pretty much like creating a level of an average first person shooter game. You create the geometry (in our case, an already existing aggregated design model), you add some textures to make it pretty and you run the whole thing in an engine for interactive 3D content, a professional name for a game engine.

I have tried two of these engines, with different results.

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3dVia Studio is the solution developped by Dassault System. It’s really powerful, with a lot of features and possibilities, and can run really large models. But on the other hand, its price reserves it for visualization professionals, and finding some support and examples on the web can be dreadful.

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The other solution is a broadly used game engine named Unity 3D. Its basic version is free, and you can pay for a professional version and specific features, like publication on portable devices (IOS and Android), or work in a collaborative environment.

After some trials with 3DVia Studio, we finally put all our effort to Unity. I will try to post one of my models, so in the meantime, you can have an really good example here.

This blog is maintained by Simon Moreau