A video showing up all over the place lately is this three-and-a-half-minute digital walkthrough of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater. Made by “a Half Life user known as Kasperg,” the video was produced using the game’s own source engine.
According to the blog digitally distributed environments:
Using the Source Engine, as opposed to more traditional Architectural Software, allows the use of dynamic lighting and a real-time walkthrough of the scene in high resolution. The movie demonstrates the quality of Half Life for visualisation using both a standard walkthrough and half way through a fly-through using the Half Life ‘Noclip’ option.
Meanwhile, architectural schools could instantly boost students’ morale if their course orientation packets came with a videogame wherein users go around blowing up anything built by Le Corbusier, in the most violent way possible. The exact explosive dynamics of architectural masterpieces.
Or Space Invaders: The Next Generation, in which you, armed to the teeth, defend 100,000 acres of pristine Colorado wilderness from an architecturally unimaginative suburban housing boom…
(See also City of Sound. With thanks to both Timo Tolonen and Ben Brockert for the tip!)
I could do it in under 30 secs. This is supposed to be impressive? 🙂
This would be a good tool to use for buildings that no longer exist, but are still architecturally important.
Needs a first person shooter.
I’d pay to see Le Corbusier’s buildings removed from history
Any architect having played HL2 must have tought about the architectual possibilites. It is very nice to see someone actually doing something about it. I think this has huge potential.
… and yes, it would make studying a lot more fun. Does anyone happen to have a 3D-model of Mies’ ’29 Barcelona Pavillion? I’d like to import it to Hammer (Source Engine editor) right away and get blasting.
Back in the clunky old days of HL1 I used to dream of introducing the Farnsworth House to the Half Life crowbar. Never got there, but did manage to make a model for a client using the Quake engine which allowed me to get stuck in with a machine gun dressed as Flat Eric…
The latest version of ArchiCAD uses the WSAD key controls popularised by Half-Life and Doom for live walkthroughs but no dynamic lighting.
There’s a program which has been floating around in Britain but doesn’t seem to have progressed anywhere called CADAI which (I think) used the Unreal engine.
What a disconnect between gamers and architects! Both creating digital spaces and neither can see each other from each side of the abyss. Well, not all, these guys are trying to reconstitute the divide and work together….. http://archlife.skynetblogs.be/ They’re using HL2 to better architecture.
At the TU Delft in the Netherlands in the studio’s of Kas Oosterhuis (ONL) we use Virtools in combination with Alias Maya to walk or cruise around in our designs.
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