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Could Unity 3D be useful for architectural simulations for an academic purposes?
I'm a master's student in architecture and doing my thesis in kinetic facades with the use of computer simulation, to find the best performance to the energy use as heating and lighting in building, I have read that unity 3D will be very useful to achieve my work but I'm worried cause I see it's for games, Can anyone confirm if it useful to accomplish architectural simulations and energy consumption and generation? Thank you
What is a "kinetic facade" ?
Regarding DISPLAYING 3D information, yes Unity is perfect.
Regarding $$anonymous$$ATHE$$anonymous$$ATICAL SI$$anonymous$$ULATIONS of energy use ... I can tell you that, of course, Unity does not happen to include that.
Indeed, no program you can buy "happens to include" that :)
It seems incredible you would think Unity happens to include something like that, so, it could be that we misunderstand your question?
Answer by Screenhog · Oct 02, 2012 at 10:57 PM
Probably not. Unity uses approximations for physics, creating effects that aren't scientifically accurate, but are accurate enough for games.
If you aren't planning on using the built-in physics system, and will be doing all calculations yourself, using Unity just as a programming environment, then it may work for what you need. However, I'm guessing that it's not going to be accurate enough (I certainly wouldn't trust the stability of a bridge if the contractor told me that the simulation worked in Unity).
Screenhog:
I believe you are speaking about PhysX which is included in Unity.
Yara -- PhysX is a system for handling in real time the Newtonian interaction of solid bodies - for example, bouncing, falling, colliding. This is used to make some (but not all) games made with Unity.
The PhysX system has utterly no connection, in any way, whatsoever to what you are interested in Yara.
To be clear, many people use Unity3D with utterly no involvement of the "PhysX" system, which is used for bouncing balls in realtime games.
Your use of Unity (like many others) would purely be using the 3D system to display and show 3D models.
So just forget about the "PhysX" system, it is utterly irrelevant (as would be many of the features in Unity).
Regarding your need for something related to simulating and processing perhaps heat transfer, or whatever, yes, obviously Unity has utterly not even the slightest connection with this in any way.
If you had some computer system (I assume you must) that models energy, solar heating, thermal momentum or whatever - then .........
as a kind of "last step" to show the output you may need to use a 3D display system to show that output as a 3D scene, which runs in real time powered by your massive energy-heat-whatever PhD code base. Yes, you could use unity for that.
(I"m afraid I simply don't know if Unity is the ideal system for such "last stage display" work ... possibly you'd be better with something like some Autodesk product, but really I simply don't know ... that would be incredibly specialized and take years to master.)
Answer by Yara · Oct 03, 2012 at 09:57 AM
Thank you for your responses, it's very helpful, there are no program that works exactly and easily as I describe except for some few programs with low rendering and animation effects, but I thought I can do it through programming cause it's applicable in blender with python scripting, is it not working the same here?
Have you heard of Comsol. http://www.comsol.com/ it is unfortunately a proprietary software and not so cheap but you could get a student license. I have used it for basic physics like eingenfrequency, propagation of forces or intensity in a conductor among others. It is really advanced and could match your need.
Yes, with Unity you can use basically Javascript (it's a little different, UnityScript), or you can also use c#
Of course, with that you can program utterly anything you want, it's a Turing machine! heh
Note that Unity is completely free for noncommercial projects, you can just go ahead and click download, and start writing Unityscript.
The documentation is quite good.
http://unity3d.com/support/documentation/
You should be aware that, while Unity is "as east as can possibly be in the field" it's really hardly "easy" to be a 3D graphics engineer. There's an awful lot to learn to get the point of casually manipulating 3D objects, etc.
All the best
Farewell, rare visitor from academia! :-)
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