
Unity creates new open source tool for architects - breadandcrumbel
https://archpaper.com/2019/10/unity-reflect-open-source-tool/
======
eps
We made a foray into designing and building a brand new house and let me tell
you, my fellow HNers, the state of affairs with the design part is ABYSMAL,
even in a reasonably modern architect firm.

Basically you first design, for look and feel, then you calculate technical
details, then you build. Or rather the architect does all three, but you would
normally want to "chip in" during the design phase - change the layout, move
things around, etc. That's where things get bloody awful.

I wasn't expecting full VR tours of the place (though it is doable [1]), but I
did expect to be able to walk through the place in 3D and see how it will look
like in the winter morning and summer afternoon. Hell no. What are you
smoking?

Floor plans. Planimetric facades. Roll your eyes to the ceiling and imagine.
3D renders that looks like from the early 00s take hours to produce, so they
aren't done often. That's _still_ renders, mind you. 3D walk-abouts are
possible, but they look like butt and they are viewed as the final step of the
process, when everything has been done and done.

And this is with firms where principles are in their 40s and generally
computer literate. It just seems that the industry is _very_ conservative with
its tooling choices AND these tools are also ridiculously expensive, further
stifling any desire to switch. So they are stuck with using technical design
software like ArchiCAD (good for laying out piping, calculating stress, air
flow, etc.) for visual design. And the resulting process is sooooo slow, small
changes and iterations take hours if not days to complete, so it takes weeks
to converge to a general design of the house.

Painful, painful process. Ugh. Caveat emptor.

[1] [https://www.benoitdereau.com/](https://www.benoitdereau.com/)

~~~
simonsarris
I designed/built my own house too[1], giving sketches to an architect and
working with him. Some major takeaways for others who have yet to build:

* No one will care about your project as much as you and this includes the architect :(

* Few(???) architects and zero builders seem to understand light/wind/circulation like people apparently intuitively did 200 years ago. You might be better off with the average curious engineer designing the house than the average architect. Everyone is astonishingly lazy, even mansions around here have terrible light/circulation problems.

* VR is no match for IRL! It's best to actually get a measuring tape and stake out the dimensions of the house on the land. An even better, get chalk and go to a big flat parking lot and draw out the entire floor plan (compass-correct) and walk inside, looking at the sun (keeping in mind what season). This worked well for me, I should have done more of it. I didn't build a porch though, which is where getting more exacting summer/winter sun angles would matter.

I actually got the chalk idea from the excellent movie The Founder, where the
creators of McDonalds try out different kitchen workflow models this way.

* Draw and sketch a huge amount. Sketch facades freeform, with the ruler, etc. The fidgeting will help you discover things.

* Read a bunch of books about old houses. Maybe most approachably: Get Your House Right and A Pattern Language

* Get a pinterest board for you + spouse. We used ours heavily and it was great for keeping track of interior detail decisions.

[1] It's a fundamentally simple house, basically a box that maximizes light
and airflow and wood burning heat, so I probably had a much easier task than
you. Some of the original drawings:
[https://twitter.com/simonsarris/status/1183150002002112512](https://twitter.com/simonsarris/status/1183150002002112512)

~~~
throwaway744678
Drawing your plan on the floor sounds a good idea, but isn't there an effect
where outdoor surfaces look much smaller than the same surface indoor? How do
you account for that?

~~~
simonsarris
Actually that seemed to be a big problem of computer models to me too. When I
was a kid I modeled the houses I was living in using Counterstrike Source's
Hammer editor, and they always felt SO SMALL to walk around "inside" when they
were correct to scale, even though one of them was a fairly big 1800's house.
So either way you simulate things you have funny perceptions.

And during construction you are kind of thrown about by the perception of the
size. When framing is done, it feels huge. Once all the plaster is on the
walls, it feels extremely "small" at first because you were so used to the big
openness of the frame, then finally as more finishes are applied it just feels
correct at last.

It's hard to describe exactly what feeling happens. But suffice to say it's
never easy to get "right" feeling simulations of a structure until you put up
literal walls.

For this reason, if you want to build a 5x7 bathroom or 11x13 bedroom or
whatever, the best possible thing you can do is find one that already exists.
Or find a 11x11 room or something and try to imagine it with 2 more feet. Then
you can carry these mental rooms around with you.

At least, that's what I did a lot of.

~~~
Mirioron
> _and they always felt SO SMALL to walk around "inside" when they were
> correct to scale, even though one of them was a fairly big 1800's house._

Is that due to the Field of View being lower in games compared to real life?
When you increase the FoV in games then things further away look smaller.

~~~
pfisch
You also move incredibly, absurdly fast. Play half-life 2 in VR and you will
get very motion sick, but you will also realize how insanely fast you are
moving.

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mslong
Unity is in a continual state of building out "shiny new toys"; libraries and
modules and sibling software that work as intended for 1 or 2 release cycles
before breaking and being discarded. I've seen this time and again with Unity
and I think it will hurt their stock going forward as they try to convince
more industries to use their tools.

Just in the past two years I've seen them develop, hype, and then quietly
drop: their VR editor, AR preview tool, Octane Renderer, Substance
integration, UNet, ML integration.

It's obvious they have an incredibly difficult time managing their tools when
their platform is fundamentally shattered between multiple releases, versions,
render pipelines, and now DOTS vs normal workflow. And it's basically
impossible for other companies to manage Unity SDKs with a ground that moves
that much.

~~~
gamblor956
_And it 's basically impossible for other companies to manage Unity SDKs with
a ground that moves that much. _

Many successful video game companies use Unity to make their games. It's
basically impossible to use except compared to the alternatives, which are
just as impossible or more so.

~~~
jayd16
It's pretty impossible to make an sdk or plugin that's runs on every version
of Unity. I haven't seen it, anyway.

Studios have the same issue. They pick a version to ship with and work around
whatever known bugs there are. Upgrading is a huge event and it's never
painless.

------
bhouston
There is current a war between UE4/Epic and Unity in the AEC market
(Architecture, Engineering and Construction.) You need to understand this in
that context.

[https://www.unrealengine.com/en-
US/feed/all/AEC](https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/feed/all/AEC)

[https://unity.com/solutions/architecture-engineering-
constru...](https://unity.com/solutions/architecture-engineering-construction)

The first move happened with Autodesk releasing Stringray and tying it tightly
to 3DS Max. Stingray was not super popular (from what I hear) but its business
motivations were real -- there was real-time visualization needs in AEC. UE4
and Unity then started to build out in this area.

I haven't actually seen numbers to back up that there is a viable market here,
but there is belief there is a market by all involved parties (Autodesk with
Stingray, Epic and Unity.)

~~~
narnianal
also great desire by infrastructure investors since they often also have to
deal with what comes out of the architecture company as design concepts

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sayangel
Where did the author get the info that this is open source? I haven't seen
Unity state anywhere that this tool we be open source.

I could see them giving source code to people who pay for some enterprise
license, but I doubt it will be open source. At least not the part that
extracts data from BIM software.

~~~
detaro
Haven't found any price/release model information at all either.

------
ossworkerrights
Wondering how many commercial products have been jeopardised by this freeware
sponsored by a corporation, and how many jobs have been put at risk?

~~~
pixelpoet
Pretty much all commercial archviz oriented 3D rendering software (where I've
spent the last 10 years) continues to feel the heat from such efforts,
including Blender and all the support it gets these days from AMD and Nvidia.

Don't understand why you're getting so harshly downvoted.

~~~
ossworkerrights
I dont really understand it either. Whats is happening is that some giants
give out “free” software, kill their competition and then monetise in other
ways (personal data, or cross selling other products), while in some cases
they make use of open source products to sell services. Either way the only
win is a lousy 9-5 job for programmers who write the freeware, or loss of jobs
for those developed the code commercially. Basically open source for non
mission critical software is digging one’s own grave.

