It is envisaged that within the next 10 years. the Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT), Ireland’s largest third level university, will move to a new campus in Grangegorman, located in the north inner City city of Dublin This site is currently being used as a hospital. It has 12 twelve listed buildings and is located in an densely populated urban community.
This page describes how the Crytek 3D Game engine is being used to create a game MOD (modification) of the current hospital site, why how it will be used in the construction and public consultation process of the new campus and how the variety of design techniques can be used in the teaching process.
3D models and computer generated environments are clock_towe_pic often used in the construction industry to help people visualise what something or someplace might look like in the future. These ‘walkthroughs’ traditionally take the form of a pre-programmed, pre-rendered movie and almost never involve user interaction. An advantage of this type of 3D movie is that it does not require any user experience needed to operate the movie viewer and thus can be easily distributed. The 3D model could can also be rendered to a very high quality.
However it does have its disadvantages. For example, it doesn’t does not allow a local resident, to look at the new buildings from their home window or from other arbitrary locations. It doesn’t does not facilitate the easy changingmodification of different proposed building de-signs as each design would have to be rendered individually, thus taking a long time.
3D gaming engines can get around these problems. Modern PC’s can now render high quality graphics very quickly, gaming technology is very sophisticated and many tools exist to all for designers to create complex and intelligent interactive 3D virtual environments. We felt that there was no reason why these tools couldn’t could not be used in the planning and consultation process.
In 2005 DIT chose a 3D gaming environment over a pre-rendered movie to aid the planning and consultation process. By creating this MOD we also hope to be able to develop techniques that could can be taught to help students in their projects.
