Bringing AAA Visuals to the AEC Industry

The architecture, engineering, and construction industry has a long history of using 3D tools for design and planning. Such tools are built for handling large quantities of data, but tend to focus more on physical accuracy than visual fidelity. While new tools are emerging to visualize projects in high-quality 3D before they're built, they're typically solutions that can't easily be extended to work with all the new technologies driving innovation in the video game industry. In this session, we'll cover techniques we've developed for rendering large architectural and infrastructure environments in real time. We'll discuss the challenge of importing these models into the Unity gaming engine, as well as the opportunities it affords in terms of improving fidelity, adding interactivity, and building for multiple platforms, including virtual reality (VR). We'll also discuss practical applications for these techniques, such as multi-user review sessions, public feedback gathering, and interactive training building.