Hi there all!
It's the first time I decide to write a tutorial about one of my cryengine architectural walkhrough videos. This is the first part of the tutorial and I hope I'll find time for the second part soon.
The Ms house is a model I've learned about at Ronen Bekerman's archviz
site . It's a very beautiful and simple house model that has been rendered by a lot of artists. There is a tutorial
here. After being in my head a long time, I've finally imported it to cryengine. My walkthrough video is
here.
Let's get start cooking
Tools we need :
Sketchup //
Cryengine free sdk //
Playup tools Sketchup plugin //
Gimp
Sketchup is the free tool from trimble (ex google) that helps us easy create 3d designs. We will use it here to export to cryengine. Playup tools is a free plug-in for sketchup that exports 3d models to cryengine. And finally, what is Cryengine?
If you are a gamer (you know, pc games) , you probably know first person shooter games (like counter-strike). In these games, you see the areas from the eyes of the walking character. The graphics of these games had become so good these days that they are almost photoreal. This means that you can create an architectural walkthrough! Cryengine is just the
engine-editor the company Crytek uses for their game series
Crysis , popular for the extreme quality of their graphics. But what makes cryengine special (and super-expensive) is that is a "what-you-see-is-what-you-get" engine. Editing is pure real-time. The user-artist, does not have to bake lights, anti-aliasing, materials or anything. You can just get there and walk. The problem is that they give the engine free but for non-commercial use, otherwise the license is very expensive to buy. There is also something basic that some architects and engineers interested in 3d real-time engines may not know. Unlike other programs, a 3d engine needs not only a powerful CPU but also a good graphics card (GPU) for decent performance. So have it in mind.
Prologue:
Go to crydev.net , make an account because the sdk needs an internet connection, and download the "free SDK"
Part 1 : Sketchup + Playup
Setup playup parameters inside sketchup
Above you can see sketchup with the house model broken in two. In red is the playup tools bar and the check vertices button. Why is that?
There is an amount of polygons you can input in cryengine as a single object. So what I try to do is keep models simple and not try to export it full. I often break buildings even furniture models in pieces and bring them back together in the engine. Make the part to export as a sketchup compontent and name it as you want. Right click on it an then export to engine
In properties there are some more options for exporting. You can leave it as it is. When collision is enabled, means that when you walk inside cryengine, you can not pass through the model. It's treated as solid object.
After some texturing and level design, here it is, the "ms house in cryengine" !
... to be continued
This is the 1st part of my tutorial. It's gonna be simple and basic but I hope it will intrigue you to use cryengine and cad programs.
Meantime you can search and watch some cryengine tutorials in youtube. They really help a lot.
And also
READ THIS http://www.crydev.net/viewtopic.php?f=315&t=71307
It will solve most of your questions about sketchup and cryengine
Thank you for reading!
And don't forget, if you work for a well known engineering / architectural firm and plan to buy a cryengine 3 license, you can hire me too!
