Immerse Yourself

A request was made to post the .blend file for the quick realtime walkthrough which I put up a couple of months back. The file has been modified to add a "world" (basically added a ground plane and sky colour so now you can go outside and have a wander around the building without disappearing into black space) and as a result the bricked up windows have also been removed. You can find the .blend file and a new .exe (Windows OS only) at the bottom of this post. Hopefully someone with a Mac can create an OSX version for trial. Note: I haven't optimised this file fully so it may be slightly "jerky" at the moment but should be perfectly useable.

Walk mode: Use the LMB (left mouse button) to look and the arrow keys to move.

For ultimate coolness you can also fly around the model,

Fly mode: Go outside, press the "Space" bar on your keyboard, look at the ground and then use the downward arrow key to float upwards. The control method for Fly mode takes a bit of getting used to but just think of the possibilities. To cancel "Fly mode" just hit the "Space" bar again to float gently to earth (or land on the roof).

On a beefy machine (Quadro FX graphics card) I can run this full screen at 1920x1200 with very smooth movement and no texture tearing. I'm currently working on a demo which has a contoured landscape, trees (just found out today that Blender can do "Face Me", must do a tutorial for that) and obviously a much more complex building. As before the main aim is to streamline the time taken for file creation along with optimisation for more mainstream computers.

Any questions, queries or comments you know what to do. Software used, AutoCad LT, SketchUp (fantastic 3D modelling software), Blender (the best in open source software, better than the commercial "professional packages") and Photoshop (naturally).

.blend (189Kb zipped)
.exe (1.4Mb zipped)