Tue 24th Feb 2015 | News
The Villa of Greta and Fritz Tugendhat in Brno, Czech Republic, built in 1930, is a pioneering monument to modern European architecture and a designated UNESCO World Cultural Heritage site. Now the freestanding, three-story villa, which is a must-see structure for anyone interested in architectural marvels, can be viewed in real time on desktops and mobile devices via immersive visualizations created by InterMoca, in conjunction with the Museum of the City of Brno.
Over the course of two years the digital artists at InterMoca worked to reconstruct the Tugendhat virtual villa using LightWave 3D and a variety of tools, including WTools3D’s LWCAD and the Unity game engine. The goal was to create high-quality models with very small footprints for real-time applications capable of running on 1GB, 2012 smart devices.
The workflow required the team to gather proper source information on-site before modeling, texturing, and pre-lighting of objects in LightWave prior to building the interactivity within the Unity game engine where the shaders, textures, compressions, and so forth are applied.
The team also obtained additional resources and size reference information inside the villa; using a Canon 7D and GoPro to capture a large number of reference photographs and video. Photos were also used for textures but the restrictions in the game engine required all the texturing to be simple layers and two UVs, which were exported to Unity using the LightWave FBX Exporter.
“Getting assets into Unity is simply not an issue with the strong FBX interchange tools in LightWave 2015. No hassles, no worries, it just works,” explains Robert Greenyer of InterMoca. “The LightWave UV tools within Modeler also made it easier for the artists; this kind of work requires really well laid out UVs,” he adds.
In LightWave’s Modeler, the artists were able to achieve exact architectural measurements before moving assets to LightWave Layout. And, since Modeler uses real-world scale units, the artists were assured that what they built would fit into the virtual environment.
The most important LightWave features for this project, according to Greenyer, were those used to generate the HDRI color maps. LightWave’s Viewport Preview Renderer (VPR) was used extensively by the group to create photo-matching scenes, which included base textures and baked HDRI color lightmaps in GLSL shading mode to match the actual photography.
Designing for mobile platforms was challenging: The artists had to be constantly aware of polygon count, texture size, and rendering challenges of mobile devices as compared to desktop machines. In the future, InterMoca hopes to further immerse viewers with a version for the Oculus Rift or Galaxy Note 4-based headset.
The visualization is available at http://intermoca.com/store/index.php and LightWave3D
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