The Use of Game Engines in GIS
December 13, 2009 8 Comments
Autodesk has been heavily investing in their 3D technology which includes bringing on 3D game developers to help with visualization. I can just imagine their pitch, “Do you want to make millions programming games or change the world with 3D Studio Max?”.
Anyway I was sent this link to a company called Clover Point which is doing some really impressive stuff with 3D gaming engines and enterprise management with their Asset Tracking Anywhere. Yea I know what you are thinking, how could I possibly get excited about something as boring as enterprise management? Well in my pervious life (before da cloud) I was heavily involved with asset management and CAFM. Now if you’ve ever been involved with this, you know how ugly the tools and how non-technical people have a great difficulty visualizing the data presented to them.
ESRI users take note:
Asset Tracking Anywhere also utilizes ESRI’s ArcGIS Server. This suite of products offers advantages over standard map engines in the ease of data layering, data creation, data visualization, data capture, raster-to-vector translation and the manipulation of projection and coordinate systems.
Detailed 3D models and immersive views are a great way to showcase your resources to managers and help them visualize their assets around the world. Tabular reporting just doesn’t help people understand the impacts of planning and future changes to their business like a great 3D model. Of course 3D modeling in GIS has been very basic, so I’m happy to see companies pushing the envelope on this.
Check out some of Clover Point’s work in these YouTube videos. As I said, very impressive stuff. What I see here is BIM and GIS coming together to help people make informed decisions.
About James Fee
Very interesting! Thanks for the post on this James. I had not known of these guys before, I will have to give them a look.
Cheers,
Stu
Interesting other companies are finally are starting to catch up with 2006. http://www.vizstudio.net/ is an Indiana Engineering/Survey/GIS shop that has been mixing GIS, CAD, 3D Studio and the web together to create environments that can run on browser, gaming engine or as 3d models for desktop use.
I have long believed that the most innovative visualization is being done by the gaming community. There is also an effort to use the SecondLife engine for GIS http://www.slgis.org/.
Another interesting project that could have impact on the spatial community is the Open Croquet Consortium
http://www.opencroquet.org/index.php/Main_Page
Thinking of gaming engines…Unreal 3 engine is now avaliable for free download. Of course for non-commerical use. Commerical use requires a license.
ATA’s 3D engine is designed to accept most common types of 3D models, C4D, Sketchup, 3DSMax, Revit and many others, through our 2D interface. Users are able to login (given they have the appropriate rights) to the web, give a UTM or position off monument and scale, and upload their models. The models are then ‘dropped’ into the 3D world and the 2D world is updated.
Many of the other attributes in the model, such as the trees, are placed directly from the GIS data held in the 2D web application. If they are moved, the 3D model changes as well.
That was pretty sweet. That 3D model is the University of British Columbia! Kudos to Clover Point.
ESRI users take note – your software is completely unsuitable for this sort of thing. Get thee to a CAD shop and generate some models, then load them into what James’ refers to up there.
*real* 3D over wide areas with detailed models just doesn’t happen in a 2.5D product that runs on the CPU. In 32-bit. On a single thread.
Well I like to browse around when i’m not so busy at work. So are you using any AutoDesk products? If so what are you using?