Museum Scene

I found a nice 3D museum model online, so I decided to post some screenshots of how it looks rendered in 3DWorld. The model was taken from Challenge #17 from the challenge page on 3DRender.com. Note that I didn't actually participate in this challenge. I also spent little time preparing. I don't actually have any real image editing or 3D modeling software, and I wanted to render this in realtime, so it's not the highest quality rendering and there are no fancy special effects. However, I still think it looks good.

This museum scene contains around 750K triangles. 3DWorld can handle scenes up to around 12M triangles, so I could have 16 of these museums in my scene and still draw it in realtime. The original file was untextured, with no normals or texture coordinates. I had to use textures that I found online and create the normal maps using a trial version of CrazyBump. The textures are applied using standard {X, Y, Z} triplanar texturing where the texture coordinates are determined by the dominant direction of the normal. It's difficult to generate automatic texture coordinates for scenes with curved geometry without using a 3rd party tool. Vertex normals are generated from the face normals by 3DWorld. Some of the triangle faces in the model have the wrong clockwise vs. CCW winding order, which causes black spots and smeared textures, but it's not too noticeable.

There are several light sources in this scene:

• Sun direct and indirect lighting with shadows
• Sky/cloud indirect lighting
• Local diffuse + indirect indoor light sources (2 yellow lanterns and 4 blue ceiling lights)

There is a one time lighting precomputation of around 10 min., and after that the scene can be drawn at around 100 FPS (frames per second). It takes 10 seconds or so to update the sun indirect lighting component when the sun position is changed. Here are some screenshots of the museum scene.

Museum scene from the front stairs.

Museum scene from the ground floor in the back.

Museum scene from above near the ceiling.

This is a fully collision and physics enabled scene in 3DWorld. The player can walk around and collide with the geometry, shoot things, and play in game mode against the smiley AIs. There are a few holes in the floor that the player can fall though, but I think I mostly fixed those problems.

That's it for now. I'll write something longer next week when I have more time.