London in Crysis: Update 3 Tower Bridge, Swiss Re & The Sandbox

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An update post and movie detailing our progress on importing our Virtual London model into Crysis. We have now been working on the model for little under a week at CASA and progress is good, the geometry has been extended out to Tower Bridge and we are experimenting with various texture configurations.

The movie below provides an insight into the movie to date with sections from both gameplay and sandbox modes to illustrate how the model is edited:


The move from holding the model in a fully functional Geographic Information System, aka ESRI's ArcScene to SketchUp, 3D Max and a finally into the Crysis Sandbox has been interesting. The engine is probably the most powerful on the market today and the speed in which it is possible to work is refreshing.

See our previous post for more movies, including a texture mapped model direct from SketchUp:

Crysis - Importing City Models: St Pauls Cathedral

We will have more updates and a tutorial as soon as the workflow is finalised.

Crysis - Importing Architectural Models

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Crysis comes with its own Sandbox allowing 3d models to be quickly and easily imported into the game engine. Its early days but we have a quick and dirty model of the University College Quad, the London Eye and the Greater London Authority building running within the engine.

Developed purely as a proof of concept the movie below provides an insight into how architectural models can be imported and visualised in realtime:



The engines features realtime shadows direct from the geometry - a significant step forward in terms of visualisation. Our previous work has focused on using the Oblivion Engine, although the work above is far from complete it is worth taking a look at the same model in Oblivion:



At the moment we are working on importing a 2km square section of London into Crysis, we should have a movie online in the next couple of days.

Thanks got to Joel at CASA for creating the work flow and import path - of note is the ability to import from SketchUp via 3D Max, allowing potentially any model from the Google 3D Warehouse to be imported, although we assume this would break license restrictions?

If you havent got a copy yet it is well worth buying a copy of Crysis...