City Walks 3D

One of the issues I ran into with the La Tourette tour was how to allow the user to explore the building while still keeping the context of the architecture. Exploded views work fine in museum brochures because the user is inside the building; the first version of this tour used exploded views but this gave the user no idea of how the floors were laid out in relation to each other.

The obvious choice was to show the entire building and allow the user to select a floor to explore and then move the floor above it out of the way--the lower floors remain visible so that the user can still see the context. The software uses Away3d to render the meshes and is compiled into a custom Flex component.

The meshes are taken from the realtime version and modified to work with Away3d. Currently, only the chapel building is available, and only the crypt is explorable--each part of the building has three versions of meshes: low-poly and a single base texture for the main view, higher-poly and multiple textures for the single rooms, and the full mesh for renders. The lower-poly versions have baked textures using Global Illumination and Ambient Occlusion.

I'll get more rooms added as time allows--reworking the meshes and getting the lights correct are the two most time-consuming parts (in some cases, days) but I'm getting the procedure streamlined so it's getting a bit faster.

Hold left mouse button and drag to pan view.
Click on a large magnifying glass icon to view the associated floor of the building or to return to the main view
Click on a small magnifying glass icon to select a room and use the Explore button to go to that room.
Within the room, click an icon to select a specific location and use the Explore button to view the related images.