Comment by eps | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eps | Hacker News Reader

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I asked all firms we spoke with how they work. None even had an option of making tweaks to the project with real-time 3D feedback. That is - change something and see how it looks in 3D on the second monitor, move the camera around, change time of the day, turn lights on and off, then try it differently, check again, try third, etc. Aim for dozens of "revisions" in a scope of one hour - that's not even remotely possible.

The existing model - get a draft, send in a list of tweaks, get a revision, send more comment, get another revision - is ridiculously inefficient and excruciatingly slow. What can be decided in a couple of hours takes days if not weeks. Coming to the architect's office and doing the same by sitting aide by side with then doesn't help much, it's still not a real-time and they get frustrated because that's not how they work.

The problem, as I mentioned, is both in architect software lacking (what's been available in game engines for years!) and the willingness to adopt the new tech and workflows on architect's side.

I mean, with all existing technologies I should be able to see my house-to-be in near exact realistic detail before we OK the project. This is NOT possible and this is supremely frustrating.

>None even had an option of making tweaks to the project with real-time 3D feedback. That is - change something and see how it looks in 3D on the second monitor, move the camera around, change time of the day, turn lights on and off, then try it differently, check again, try third, etc. Aim for dozens of "revisions" in a scope of one hour - that's not even remotely possible.

It's totally possible. 99.999% of clients aren't willing to pay for it, and architects aren't interested in having you do a dozen revisions no matter how much effort you think that is (an hour lol!).

I can tell you that simple walkthrough stuff is simple in sketchup (time of year/day built in), but most house builds don't require a detailed sketchup model with lighting real textures, rendering, etc.

You also have to remember that they are interviewing you as a client. If your expectation is 12 revisions in an hour as a reasonable, then there's very little they can do to make themselves competitive and I can understand why they wouldn't offer a likely unreasonable client an atypical contract.

You're going to them to get a proposal/quote. I can understand not being willing to offer you something you're clearly not willing to pay for. And from their perspective there's a lot of risk involved in taking you if they have someone else who isn't asking for atypical free extras knocking on their door.

Changing most things is hard work, not something that can be done in seconds. Have you ever done 3D modelling?

I did.

Changes being "hard work" is a matter of a tool not being well adapted to the job, which is a problem with the tool, not the process. If I am playing with a floor plan, then certain changes, like moving walls and openings should be as easy to do as possible. If they aren't, it's the wrong tool for the job ... which is exactly what I mentioned in the first post - that the architects routinely use heavy-lifting ArchiCAD to do design phase sketching.

I think you're trying to describe bim software but you don't know what it is. This already exists. The most common software for it at the moment is Revit.

There are a lot of technical reasons why this may not be possible. For example, modern real-time lighting often uses precomputed data such as lightmaps to speed up/avoid real time calculations. For static geometry and lighting much of the work can be done 'offline' before runtime however it is not unheard of for this offline process to take hours (e.g. computing high resolution lightmaps for large environments).

There has been huge advances in this area recently. Real-time ray-tracing and lighting is Nvidia’s primary marketing push right now with their RTX cards. Unity/Unreal/Blender can all produce very high fidelity real time lighting while editing. It’s great technology.

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