Fantasy Pump House Background
This started as an 'after work' side project. My original concept was to center a small 'game world' around a 1/2 buried, over-scaled, pump house that could be explored in first person via a game engine. I had been using Unreal, Stingray, and Lumion at work to create project walkthrough executables for our clients and had developed a reliable work-flow between CAD, Revit, Max, Unity using fbx, .dae, or glTF. Revit at that time sucked at renderings, so I would drop the models into Lumion to study my modeling stages, even for my personal work.
I retired before finishing this Pump House model and have since dropped my license for some of the big ones. Revit, AutoCAD, Civil3D, 3DS Max, Maya ...For the last 5 years I've re-tooled my 3D hobby with share-ware and free ware software and have regaining my love for POV. I've been re-visiting old POV projects and was looking for something new to build and animate. I found a few of my original sketches for this Pump House concept so I will use those as a starting point.
Pre POV work :
- Acquire a 30-day trial of Revit to open my model and extract the 2D CAD as .dwg for elevation, plans, and sections
- Export the Revit model as fbx or gbXML (might write a BIM to POV tool some day? - look at gbxml.PolyLoop)
- Load .dxf elevations and plans into FreeCAD for clean-up and additions.
- Set a drawing / world scale more favorable to my POV work flow
- Draft a site plan with the building footprint - add walks/paths, & topo limit and consider the animation path for adding additional hardscapes
- Raster the CAD drawings for image underlays in POV
- Load the .fbx Revit models into Blender to establish position, scale, and world 'extents'. I like having a 1-to-1 scale model in Blender even if it's just to study the height field map and for quick camera & object positions. There may be a few parts that I model in Blender and exported as .obj for smooth meshes.
- Create a grayscale displacement topo map base on my sketches. The ground base will be a HF map with a kitbash approach to rocks & cliff edges
- Generate a better hand sketch to work from. I'm thinking about adding some foreground 'feature' creature or alien plants? - maybe a large dragonfly - I have one I modeled in Sculptris. Maybe a lizard?
- POV prep - map CAD elevations and plan onto image planes.
- Pull reference of a lizard for POV modeling
- Start a list of POV models needed
This will get me started ..... I'll post some screen grabs as I work through this. Miller
A chuck of the Lumion flywheel model - and found my dragonfly model and textures
Concert sketches - I'll post a better sketch soon. miller
OK - so I got a 30-day Revit license and was able to grab the cad and reference I need.
Exported the Revit elevations and created 1 dwg. I PDF'd the vectors and imported into Photoshop to rasterize. I'll export portions of the images for 'underlays' in POV
I'll tackle the flywheel, spokes, and mounts first.
I cut a section through my Revit model and imported the .fbx into Blender. I rotate the model 90 degrees to match the POV lathe and aligned 2 image planes for the elevation and plan. I use small spheres, re-named to 'pointData.00#.' , to mark the profiles I need to for linear and cubic spline lathe.
POV rendering of 4 Lathes that will start the flywheel model
Blender points exported for a POV sphere_sweep { cubic_spline to create spokes . POV renderings
I went back into Lumion to start working on the topo to help with conceptualizing the lower platform & the approach to the scene. Using these screen grabs, I modeled a few ideas in Revit. I'll bring the Revit model back into Lumion via .fbx to help finish the topo.
After looking at this first camera angle, I think I'll change this lower platform to a pill-shape instead of a rectangle.
Changed the front platform corners to a curve and add steps into the water. Using Revit to mark some key elevation points.
POV renderings of the entry platform. Very shinny
Test renderings and animation of blob fountain. Tapped out on system RAM so the landscape vegetation is being scaled back some. I'm at a good stopping point to start a new creature. I have a dragon fly mesh model that I'm re-modeling in POV.
Here is the current scene file.
POV scene file - Blob fountain
