Daniel Learmonth

 The Brief

1. Create virtual Vejle City for use in aiding and informing the municipality planning process and for public consultations.

2. It has to be integrated with Epiito’s VRStudio cave system which creates a shared VR-like experience.

3. It has to have a high degree of accuracy in order to be useful in aiding the planning process.

4. It has to be well presented and user friendly in order to better engage, communicate with and gain insights during the public consultation.

5. Future developments must be able to be added and toggleable to show various planning options available.

The Challenge

1. The VRStudio is a 4 screen, cave system with passive stereo 3D. The resulting resolution is effectively 10240x1600, so in order to render at real time frame rates of 30-60fps the virtual city would have to be highly performant.

2. The city would have to combine a number of different CAD and GIS formats including Revit, GeoTiff, Rhino, Sketchup and satellite imagery.

3. The resulting models had to retain their accuracy, while performing well under realtime conditions.

Our Approach

   The first issue to resolve was creating accurate terrain that closely matched building models provided. A number of sources were assessed before a workflow from source data into Unity’s efficient terrain system was devised. The terrain system would then stitch together the terrain data chunks and automatically optimise the triangle count in real time depending on the users distance from it.

   Due to the complexity and number of CAD models to be brought in we had to design an efficient and effective workflow to bring the models into the virtual environment. It had to be semi-automated in order for the solution to be cost effective, or even possible at all.

   After a manual workflow was created and proven we then created a number of scripts in 3DSMax that allowed the most laborious steps of the workflow to be automated. This included merging geometry by shared material, merging duplicate materials, separating building meshes from content/furniture/detail meshes, arranging the hierarchy and then finally exporting into a Unity friendly format.

   Once in Unity the separate CAD conversions were combined into a single 3D environment. Building models were rolled into a Level-Of-Detail (LOD) system, to display low detail or high detail models according to user distance, and trees, lighting and the environment was added along with camera PostFX. Then the VRStudio functionality from Epiito was added and a few further optimisations were carried out.

The Result

   The end result was highly performant and well presented - operating at between 30 and 60fps in the VRStudio.

   Vejle Municipality used the application in their City Planning Lab and used it to facilitate planning discussions amongst a whole range of end users - from school classes and families to politicians, developers and the planning technical committee.

   Additional buildings and planning proposals were added over the following years and a VR version was created for further public engagement.

End Client

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