Virtual Reality in a City of the Past
Made with Blender and Unity3D by Pitibonom.
Pitibonom writes:3D real-time simulations of cities, buildings and places as they were in the past.
Though the real-time play is done in Unity3D, all 3D models are built and dual-mapped in Blender.
The screen capture shows a French town called La Rochelle as it might have looked like, with all it’s
city walls, towers, streets and places, in the XIIIth century.For those who like serious gaming and virtual reality experience, and feel like having a walk in the town, you can run the 3D engine and have a visit right in your web browser [Unity3D plugin required].
All models except trees & plants and relief are built in blender. I started with the good old 2.49b and now i use the 2.66. I also use animations I built in blender from self made models and rigs.
Of course all this is a WIP and i use it as a demo for showing that today, tools can allow all people to visit historic lost places, at home and in family on the family computer. I’m an individual and hop i can sell one day some historic virtual reality tools like this to earn some few money and live from this :)
Have a nice walk 600 years backward !
Wow !!! Fantastic
Whut? No Linux version of the Unity Plugin? Bah! Really interested in this type of thing, too…
A well modeled setting. Good for video game creation. The main problem I was seeing is the lack of shadows. This is not the same as shading, rather it is the darker areas that lie across lit areas cast by the objects on the opposite side from the source of light. Many video games have this problem. Later ones are getting better in that department though. With the technology we now have for 3D art, including Blender, shadows are not that hard to incorporate into a game.
Why the low-definition video capture?
thanks to all for your comments !
About Linux, nope i developped all this with the 3.4 version of unity and didn’t dare move to the 4.0 as i had many problems migrating the project from 2.6 to 3.1 and 3.4.
However, the standalone windows exe works fine except for mouse capture in any linux distro with wine. i can imagine, though i never tested it yet, that a windows install of ffx with the unity plugin can also work fine in wine ;-) will have to test this.
For shadows, there’s absolutely nothing to do except buyin the 1500€ pro version. they integrate render to texture and also shadows for the most interresting part. I saw my project on a computer of a friend who has unity pro and YES shadows make the look MUCH MUCH more realistic, immersive & beautifull.
The video capture is of bad quality. I agree but to be totally honest, i never found a video capture tool able to give a nice capture at 25 fps. Maybe i didn’t search enough or maybe my computer is too weak for doing this work. I’m so sorry for this ! Anyway the video is just a video. the most interresting par is in the link Bart gave: http://kleioscope.fr/projets/rupellaXIII/index.html and in wich you can freely walk anywhere in the medieval town, at full frame rate and full resolution ( after installing the small unityplayer plugin of course )
have a nice blends all and thanks again for your words :)
For shadows, if you don’t have Unity Pro, you can always bake your shadows in Blender.
nope. in fact models are designed 1 by 1 in blender and everything is assembled in unity. However unity can bake shadows and use them in the indie version. however it’s really a pain and heavy task to bake shadows in unity. I confess after digging this way, i gave up the idea. I’m this lazy that i wait for lil money to buy unity pro with shadows and offer the best to ppl. ;-)
I cannot say how amazing this is!!
How long did this take you to make?!?!???
Info on the music? It sounds like a lute or guitar duet.
Not sure why it came up as anonymous but still grabbed my picture. I forgot to tab to the next field and it must have forgotten to auto-fill the rest in. Not quite digging it, looks like it could be misused.
Glad you like it :)
From scratch, for Gimp part with texture work, blender part for modeling and UVing and rigging and animating, unity part for integrating coding scripts and shaders and audio integration it’was all done in about 2500 hours in one year. Lots of try & redo phases to
make everything almost correct. imho there’s 4 to 6000 more hours to spend for making this project usable and available by public.
For the music it is guitar. It come from a man playing and recording very good things. The music is free to use and distribute and you can find more at http://www.jsayles.com/familypages/earlymusic.htm
Magnificent. Thank you so much for sharing this. I watched the whole video, alternately amazed at the technique and just relaxing and enjoying the scenery. It was a pleasant place to visit, and for once not a single orc got in the way of the view :-)
Well done and thanks for sharing. I like walking around in these kind of scenarios. Hope you’ll find a sponsor for the pro version and similar projects.
thanks Vanfanel & Clemens :)
I’m glad you enjoyed the video an really hope you enjoyed the 3D free wal even much more ! Nope, no Orc nor Werewolves in the scene. I confess this idea when through my mind ( at least equipping some crossbow fo shooting the seagulls :D ) but it is not the object of the software. it’s oriented towards calm visit at your rythm mostly like you’d do if you come in real life in a place like this…
Yes the pro version, though it’s quite expensive for me, is mandatory for many reasons.
Speaking of Unity and VR it would be great if you could make it compatible with this month coming Oculus Rift virtual reality headset which should support Unity out of the box.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1523379957/oculus-rift-step-into-the-game