Crysis Engine Used In Architectural Visualization
Posted Wednesday, February 7th, 2007, at 12:03 pm Eastern by Mark Wallace
Csven over at reBang has the interesting news that French firm IMAGTP (which seems to be an architectural consultancy that relies heavily on 3D visualization tools) has “licensed the CryENGINE 2 game engine for use as an architectural and urban planning tool.” The CryEngine, of course, is the game engine made by Crytek, which powers their FarCry and Crysis games — which are known as having among the best graphics of any FPS. Oddly, though, Crytek’s games are known more for their expansive outdoor vistas than for their architectural wonder. Still, it’s nice to see more evidence that such tools of 3D connectivity are useful for more than just play. Game technology: Not just for games anymore.
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Given the open-sourcing of the SL client and its protocols, I wonder if it would be worthwhile for someone to just toss the llrenderer and use a commercial game engine instead — like Crytek’s, or Project Offset’s, or Unreal’s, or even some other open-source ones, which would all be perfectly capable of rendering SL prims but would add… well, so much. Shadows, for instance, or full-screen effects like bloom or even areas that are black and white (regardless of your avatar). Just a thought…..
I would like to find out how they licensed it. Six figure licence fees for state of the art game engines tend to keep the architectural community from using them.
For Architectural Visualization, Crytek is only interested in forming relationships with exclusive partners, presumably to charge huge license fees. They won’t even talk to you otherwise if you want to license their technology for use in arch vis. Probably in time they will go the way SGI did as a result of their “high brow” approach which caters only to exclusive partners with deep pockets. Haven’t they figured out yet that the entire video game industry is driven by the low end of the market? Its the volume, and the content that counts. Whoever caters to that reality will be there in the long run.
The good news is that in time the technical advantage of Crytek 2 will filter to other, newer game engines with a more visionary approach to opening new market segments. I’m among many architects that would love to see a software package emerge which is designed to author visualization projects. Ideally, one day we will be able to author DVD’s to consoles as the ideal client presentation and networked VR medium. The technology exists today, just no one has the vision to exploit it.