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The Autodesk Virtual GDC Booth: From Autodesk® Inventor® to the Unity Game engine
In the preparation for GDC, there was a discussion about having a more ‘interactive’ experience on The Area for GDC and the idea of having a virtual GDC booth came up. Seeing that Autodesk trade show booths are designed in Autodesk® Inventor®, theoretically it would be possible to export a mesh and have that running in a game engine like Unity.
Original booth rendered from Autodesk Inventor
Autodesk Trade Show & Event Material Resource Supervisor, Gilles Houle, had the design of the GDC booth in Inventor. Using the Pack and Go feature, he exported the mesh. This mesh was then handed over to me to prepare it for the game engine. I imported the file into Autodesk® 3ds Max® and re-exported it as an Autodesk® FBX® (unfortunately the mesh didn’t read directly in Autodesk® Maya®). Once I had the model in Autodesk® Maya®, I realized that the mesh was very heavy and wasn’t good for a game experience. I quickly constructed a game-resolution version of the booth using Maya’s polygon modeling and snapping tools. I also rapidly UV-mapped the model and careful attention was paid to making sure that UV’s didn’t overlap so that we could do lightmapping later on.
High resolution booth model imported into Maya
Reconstructed low-res booth
The model was exported as an FBX file into a Unity project assets folder. The workflow between Unity and Maya is quite simple. Unity reads FBX scenes and preserves a lot of information, so making changes and re-exporting is easy. Once the booth was in Unity, and I had set up all the real-time materials, it came time to do lightmapping.
Importing the booth into Unity. Lightmapping was done using the Autodesk® Beast™ integration in Unity
Unity Pro has an integration of Autodesk Beast, a lightmapping tool. I was pleasantly surprised to find that Autodesk® Beast™ is very tightly integrated into the Unity workflow. Generating lightmaps really is as easy as a few clicks and you get great results, very fast. In the past, I had generated lightmaps for game levels using Mental Ray, and even for a basic room it could take hours to generate a lightmap with a high enough quality that you didn’t see the dithering from the final gathering. Not so with Beast. It generated a high quality lightmap in say, 15 minutes (a quick coffee break and it was done).
Getting the interactivity for the game working properly was also relatively simple (I’m a programmer, so I found it easier than say, an artist might have). Using Unity’s Javascript scripting engine, I was able to script the interactivity I wanted.
Overall, this was a fun little project and it shows how you can start with a CAD model and end up with a web 3D walkthrough.
Leonard Teo is a Technology and Business Consultant. His clients include Gnomon School of Visual Effects, The Gnomon Workshop, CG Channel, Autodesk and CGarchitect. He had previously worked for Autodesk, Softimage and was the founder of CGSociety and Ballistic Publishing. Visit his blog at http://www.leonardteo.com.
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