One of my kids is doing a school project, coincidently he's doing forensics this year are reconstructing a crime scene! I found it amusing when he asked if he could use our Antics 3d application, given the direction Scene Systems are heading. Anyway he's off and running and it's an excellent example of how well suited Antics is to this type of use. The first thing we covered off was how to setup the floorplan to scale. He has a blueprint of a home and is wanting to build it in Antics3d. We set the plan up as a .jpg 512x512 pixels. Texture maps for billboards will be resized if they are not a variant of this size. (ie 256x256, 1024x1024, that sort of thing.) The plan here (so to speak) is to use a billboard with the floorplan texture applied as a template for our construction. Now simply create a billboard ("house"), rotate it so it's flat on a floor plan and then you are ready to set the scale. We were lucky because we had a doorway which was labelled as 1m wide.
So in order to know what 1m was in the antics world, we built another billboard 1m by 1m. when rotated that to lay flat on the floor as well and then we could scale the "House" Billboard so that the doorway size matched the 1m Billboard. This gave us absolute confidence that the floorplan could now be traced with new rooms. A couple of good tricks, set the House billboard to FREEZE.
Set the texture of the rooms you build as transparent or 50% opacity. (that way you'll be able to see the measurements). Try to not have overlapping floorplans/rooms, they will cause problems when you want characters to navigate from room to room.
As the project moves forward I'll post the progress for you.
So in order to know what 1m was in the antics world, we built another billboard 1m by 1m. when rotated that to lay flat on the floor as well and then we could scale the "House" Billboard so that the doorway size matched the 1m Billboard. This gave us absolute confidence that the floorplan could now be traced with new rooms. A couple of good tricks, set the House billboard to FREEZE.
Set the texture of the rooms you build as transparent or 50% opacity. (that way you'll be able to see the measurements). Try to not have overlapping floorplans/rooms, they will cause problems when you want characters to navigate from room to room.
As the project moves forward I'll post the progress for you.
