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You're reading from  Unity for Architectural Visualization

Product typeBook
Published inSep 2013
Reading LevelIntermediate
PublisherPackt
ISBN-139781783559060
Edition1st Edition
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Author (1)
Stefan Boeykens
Stefan Boeykens
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Stefan Boeykens

Stefan Boeykens is a Belgian architect-engineer. Starting out as a professional architect in several offices, he returned to KU Leuven in 2000, at the Department of Architecture, for teaching and research, completing his PhD on Building Information Modelling in 2007. Stefan is an experienced researcher with a variety of IT skills. Aside from teaching BIM, he is mainly working as senior Innovation and BIM manager for the Belgian D-Studio, focusing on BIM middleware and consultancy. He is a frequent speaker at BIM-related events and is actively involved in BIM standardization groups, including CEN/TC 442 (Europe) and Belgian Technical Committees. He is father of three boys and enjoys musical composition, reading, cycling and life-long-learning.
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Assets and the Unity workflow


Unity was developed in the context of game development and provides an efficient integration into existing pipelines, independent of the used modeling and content creation software. Regardless if the team consists of you alone or you are part of a large group of designers, developers, artists, and technical directors, you need to get your workflow up and running to be efficient. This is equally relevant for architectural offices, which are also organized around long-running projects where different people interact and collaborate, using a variety of software applications for drafting, modeling, and presentations.

Inside Unity, you create a project, which is stored inside a single folder on your hard disc. Within the project folder, there are a wide variety of folders and files, which are mostly regulated in the background by Unity. The Assets folder is where all your files are stored that you need to manage directly, such as models, scripts, textures, and scene files. There is a direct relation between what you see inside the Unity project panel and what occurs as files in your local file system.

Unity also supports additional modules that facilitate the technical aspects of collaboration, for example, by setting the project up with the Asset Server system or by tuning the project metadata (the information about each file) into separate meta-files, that are better suited for version control systems (VCS), such as Subversion or Git. While such systems are common with software development, they are not widely used in architectural projects. They present an opportunity to share projects between different users, computers, and systems. Using a version control system with Unity, team members can check out files in the project and receive changes from other members. This is more efficient than copying the whole large project folder back and forth since only changes need to be synced. Only the Assets and ProjectSettings folders need to be synced; other folders are generated locally. More information on using external version control systems with Unity can be found at http://docs.unity3d.com/Documentation/Manual/ExternalVersionControlSystemSupport.html, the official Unity documentation website.

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Unity for Architectural Visualization
Published in: Sep 2013Publisher: PacktISBN-13: 9781783559060
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Author (1)

author image
Stefan Boeykens

Stefan Boeykens is a Belgian architect-engineer. Starting out as a professional architect in several offices, he returned to KU Leuven in 2000, at the Department of Architecture, for teaching and research, completing his PhD on Building Information Modelling in 2007. Stefan is an experienced researcher with a variety of IT skills. Aside from teaching BIM, he is mainly working as senior Innovation and BIM manager for the Belgian D-Studio, focusing on BIM middleware and consultancy. He is a frequent speaker at BIM-related events and is actively involved in BIM standardization groups, including CEN/TC 442 (Europe) and Belgian Technical Committees. He is father of three boys and enjoys musical composition, reading, cycling and life-long-learning.
Read more about Stefan Boeykens