A 3D restitution of a french city (Nantes)

[Brun°oO]

We have released to the history museum "The Castle of the dukes of Brittany" of Nantes, an interactive application using Ogre 1.2.2 where the user can visit some districts of Nantes during the 18th century.
Several archive documents have been used in order to reproduce the city arround 1757 above the autority of historians, museum conservators.
1 aerian view based upon an engraving of 18th century has been created and 11 districts has been reproduced. The application displays the 3D environment using 1920x1200@60fps resolution.

Here some screenshots:






[edit]
A comparative with the current place:


The installation:


Our graphic workflow:

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You can grab a video (107Mo) here :
video



Some links:
axyz-images
Museum 'The Castle of the dukes of Brittany'



Many thanks to the Ogre team and community!

[Mr_Ridd]

I haven't watched the video but the screen shots look excellent.

Well done.

[Paulov]

Yeah!!!

superb!!!!!

really really nice!!! downloading the video now..

Hope that in the video I can see an aerial view.

wowowoowow.. what a nice project.

what is your polycount and hardware?¿?

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yeah!! I´ve seen the video, very professional job. congrats
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[Brun°oO]

Each district have near 150 000 polygons.
So in memory (cpu RAM), we got arround 1 800 000 polygons (with the aerial view).
When the user visits a district with a simple joystick, he is constrained by invisible walls. He must find the exit in order to retrieve the aerial view which acts like a hub for other districts. This behavior is very simple, don't forget its a museum for people from 7 to 77 year old not for hardcore gamers .
The hardware has been targeted high: the gpu was a nvidia 6800 (512Mo) and the cpu was a 2Ghz one (2 Go). In fact, we got a lot of textures with a high definition due to the final resolution (1920x1200@60Hz).
We have minimized risks on this project using a strong hardware configuration .

[manowar]

I am downloading the video now. The pictures look really nice.
Did you use the octree scene manager ? How did you split the models(meshes) for efficient culling ?

Thanks.

[sinbad]

Wow, that's gorgeous!

Grabbing the video now...

[Biggles]

wow! amazing work! It must have taken ages to produce all those assets! Are you planning on adding further interactivity or will it be a more on-rails with tour guide sort of affair?

[Caphalor]

Wow, that's only great. Especially the shadows and of course the meshes and textures are beautiful.
The only thing which wasn't perfect in the video were the grass.

[Kencho]

Kudos! Looks impressive

[haffax]

Very good graphics and very stylish map and transition to the detailed view.
One thing that imho will greatly improve optics is to use anisotropic filtering for the ground textures. Especially the cobble stone texture is very blurry compared to the high detail textures for the buildings. Using anisotropic filtering should fix this.

[riri]

Hi

I guess it's the application available in self service in the Nantes's History Museum in the castle?

Yes I used it and it's really impressive. I'm really happy and amazed it's realized with Ogre, really great.

[Brun°oO]

(I've added some screenshots on my first post)

Thanks for your comments. A few answers:

I guess it's the application available in self service in the Nantes's History Museum in the castle?

Yes, that's it

Did you use the octree scene manager?

We have used the basic scene manager with a custom hierarchy behavior (attach/detach nodes and load/unload resources in order to leverage the display processing)

How did you split the models(meshes) for efficient culling?

The meshes have been manualy splited during the production stage. We have made a custom workflow under XSI Softimage in order to quickly setup a district. Now, we have made a custom tool under XSI in order to split a mesh following a grid criteria.

It must have taken ages to produce all those assets!

Yes, it was a big/long project since we have started to develop the custom workflow under XSI Softimage using Ogre, then we have started to produce assets, and we have validated each assets with historians and museum conservators keeping in mind the realtime constraints. The length of this project was near 18 months (2~8 person team).

Are you planning on adding further interactivity or will it be a more on-rails with tour guide sort of affair?

The aim of this project was to provide to the user a "moment of relaxation"during its visit of museum: there is no text, no information, only a 3D restitution. A different version is scheduled with newer functionalities
in a different room.

Using anisotropic filtering should fix this

You're right, we have to increase the quality of the texture filtering and try the anisotropic filtering.

The only thing which wasn't perfect in the video were the grass

Yes, the trees and grass need to be improved. In fact, "organic rendering" is the next challenge for us.

[Vectrex]

excellent. Great shading and textures. You should check out the 'hdrLib' in the wiki. HDR would look great. You only really need a real hdr sky and it works great.
ps Those XSI tools look good. Thinking of releasing them?

[Paulov]

Helow

The new pics look interesting.

its like a oFusion for XSI.

So, did you take feedback from "normal" citytzens, what do they think of this kind of aplications?¿?¿? The navigate easily?¿¿ they find it interesting?¿ and things like that.

bye bye

[nikki]

Hmm... Maybe I should try XSI some time. Sinbad, Valve, and you guys seem to like it.

The city looks really cool. I can see that you guys put a lot of work into the details. On the whole, how many people are working on it (I mean the art, not the programming etc.)? So how did you gather the information? You moved around the city and took pictures? It must have been a hard thing to do. Making a fictional city is easier, but recreating an already existing city... That must be tough.

[jjp]

Looks very good. Do turn on anisotropic filtering, your great textures don't deserve to get blury like this