Most Relevant Package for Engineering Visualisation

mickyg

Hi All

I'm not trying to start an app war thread, but I am interested to know what would be the most ideal choice for a realtime solution when it comes to engineering visualisation. I have a lot of thoughts floating around in my head, so I'll just list some notes that might be relevant:

1) A lot of the work is large scale road projects, so complex intersections (normally represented by a single mesh), bridges, surface triangulations (normally with no thickness)

2) The 3D staff are all primarily artists with little to no programming experience

3) The artists are all quite proficient in 3Ds Max so being able to create the bulk of the project (meshes, materials, cameras) in Max would be beneficial

4) Due to the size of the projects and limited timeframes, normally only basic tiling UV Mapping is employed - full custom unwraps are an exception, not the norm

5) The ability to instantly switch between first person cameras, free flying cameras and fixed path cameras is required

So far I am thinking the only relevant options would be UDK or Unity. I have started to look at UDK however I can already see potential problems arising with collision meshes, scales, uv mapping and other things.

I have no experience with Unity, so for all I know it might present the same problems. I was hoping people could chime in and help me figure out what would be best for our needs.

Thanks everyone!

gsokol

Not sure what the problem would be with collision meshes, scales, uv mapping and whatnot..What specifically do you see going wrong here?

Unity will most likely be the simpler, easier. solution. Udk is a lot more powerful but also a lot more in-depth.


Also, the ability to make web builds from Unity would be a great, simple way to distribute.

mickyg

Because our road meshes are often quite complex and with many parts crossing over and under other parts, a custom collision mesh is the only way to go.

I think this means I can't export as FBX - as far as I can see collisions only work properly when you export as an ASE file. Thus I lose the ability to automatically import textures as materials that FBX provides.

Even so, the automatic breaking up of collision meshes into convex shapes handled by the ASE import doesn't always work well - an example is a road with a slight gradient, sometimes the player will walk over an imaginary 'step' in the collision mesh and be unable to walk back up the hill.

Scales is just a pain in the bum that I need to convert everything prior to exporting from Max since UDK has such a strange unit system. Nothing major though, just an inconvenience.

I am certainly open to the possibility that Unity may be a better fit - I've just downloaded the free version and it handles automatic mesh collision and works at the same scale as our max files, two definite pluses so far. To be honest, I am preferring the UI as well, but thats just personal preference I guess.

Thanks gsokol!