Author: Kaspar Koov

It is said that “There comes a time when all people break down and do the unthinkable: They read the manual”.
And when that happens, we like to be prepared. So we upgraded 3D Wayfinder Administration panel user manual.

Adding and editing projects, floors or locations is quite easy, but when it comes to nodes in 3D floor-plans, connecting ceilings with nodes or adding locations to nodes, you may need some instructions.

Managing 3D floor plans is actually not that hard, but don’t forget: “If everything else fails, read the instructions”.

Our customers ask us what is the difference between Lite, Standard and Premium modelling.

We made have made a short description page for each modelling level:

• Lite makes simple and easily understandable floor-plan in real 3D
• Standard is a good compromise between details and performance
• Premium 3D floor-plans make most out of WebGL

In each page you can also see example floor plans and you’ll find the links to these maps in 3D Wayfinder application. These examples show the difference between details and the way floor plans are modeled.

To get your 3D floor plan from us, see our price calculator and ordering form.

We have implemented SSAO shader for FRAK WebGL engine and 3D Wayfinder. SSAO is Screen Space Ambient Onclusion, it will make shadows for corners and edges. This means more life-true 3D and nicer floor plans for 3D Wayfinder users.

Below is the screen-shot of 3D floor plan of one accommodation building in Finland. In left there is SSAO applied and in right one not:

Here you can see the whole floor plan with SSAO shader:

Here is no SSAO:

And here is SSAO only image. This will give the idea how SSAO changes the final 3D rendering you see on the screen.

For setting SSAO shader options in 3D Wayfinder, go to “Setting” menu under “SETUP” in 3D Wayfinder Administration. There you will find SSAO settings under “Camera”.

Seems, that iPad Air doesn’t support 32 bit floating-point textures, although it should because it has the OES_texture_float extension.

So we made exception for iPad devices to use 16 bit floating-point textures and 3D Wayfinder runs now on iPads too. Tested in Safari and Chrome.

Pixel Vector Media provided wayfinding application and kiosks for Abu Dhabi International Petroleum Exhibition & Conference that took place in 9. – 12. November in Abu Dhabi. This was the largest ADIPEC so far. There were more than  2,000 exhibiting companies displaying 1000’s of oil and gas products.

With a really limited time-frame Pixel Vector Media created directory, loaded 2D map to 3D Wayfinder, connected map with directory and created routes. To make it independent from internet connection, off-line version of 3D Wayfinder was used (included in “Pro” service plan). With 5 days the project was up and running.

Shaders now use explicit vertex attribute locations in 3D Wayfinder. This and other improvements gave us approximately 35% increase in FPS (frames per second) in WebGL. Change is more noticeable with larger floor plans.

Tests were done with 2 PC-s, the same one we used before:

1. Laptop 1. Low-end laptop from Samsung: Quad-Core 1 GHz, 4GB RAM, Integrated video card AMD Radeon HD 8250, Windows 8
2. Desktop 1. AMD Phenom II X2 550, 2 cores, 3.1GHz, 4GB RAM, video card AMD Radeon HD 6670, Windows 7

The same 4 floor plans were tested as previously:

• Demo project – 2 floors, 43k solid faces and 6k transparent faces
• Science center building – no locations entered, 520k solid faces and 13k transparent faces
• Shopping mall 1 – 5 floors, 96k solid faces and 18k transparent faces
• Shopping mall 2 – 7 floors, 246k solid faces and 27k transparent faces

We got following results:

Where marked with * IE used software rendering for WebGL. There for we didn’t measure IE in this test with PC1.

We have tested 3D Wayfinder with different browsers and different PC-s. Main criteria which we were measuring is FPS (frames per second). The goal was to check how fast is WebGL in most common browsers.

We are limiting FPS to 30, as human eye mostly don’t recognize the difference above 30 FPS. For example most movies are 24 or 30 FPS. Limiting FPS will allow to add more resources to other javascripts running.

Internet Explorer 11 supports WebGL, but under Windows 7 in some cases IE uses software rendering, which is much lower in speed than rendering directly in hardware.

PC-s we used for testing were:

1. Laptop 1. Low-end laptop from Samsung: Quad-Core 1 GHz, 4GB RAM, Integrated video card AMD Radeon HD 8250, Windows 8
2. Laptop 2. High-end laptop from Samsung: i7-3635QM (2.4ghz),16 GB RAM, video card HD8870M / HD4000 – 1GB GDDR5 and Nvidia GeForce GTX 780 Ti, Windows 8
3. PC 1. AMD Phenom II X2 550, 2 cores, 3.1GHz, 4GB RAM, video card AMD Radeon HD 6670, Windows 7
4. PC 2. Intel i7-4770k 3,5GHz, 16 GB RAM, video Gtx 780 ti matrix platinum edition

Browser version were the last ones at the time:

Internet Explorer – 11

Firefox – 32

Chrome – 37

We tested 4 projects:

• Demo project – 2 floors, 43k solid faces and 6k transparent faces
• Science center building – no locations entered, 520k solid faces and 13k transparent faces
• Shopping mall 1 – 5 floors, 96k solid faces and 18k transparent faces
• Shopping mall 2 – 7 floors, 246k solid faces and 27k transparent faces

We got following results:

Where marked with * IE used software rendering.

There is now specular shader implemented in 3D Wayfinder. This will give more life-like look for materials like metal, stone, plastic etc.

Specular shaders create the bright highlights that you would see on a glossy surfaces. It is mimicking the reflection of light sources. At this time the shader is not configurable, but we will add advanced configuration option in near future.

Below is the 3D floor plan model of Ahhaa Science Center. On the left there is the building with specular shader applied and on the right side the roof has no specular.

For setting specular shader in 3D Wayfinder CMS, go to “Materials” and then “Media”. There you can select “Specular” for every material you have in your project.

We are continuously improving appearance of 3D floor plans. Following development tasks will also include implementing other shaders like:
1) SSAO – Screen Space Ambient Onclusion. This will make shadows for corners and edges.
2) Reflection – reflection of skybox and other rounding details.
3) Normal map. With normal map it is easy to create heterogeneous surfaces and terrains. For example this helps to make grass or wall with bricks.

With last week update we have done some improvements in our WebGL engine FRAK. Average performance increase is 75% and with larger floor plans it is even more.
We measured FPS (frames per second) increase from 5FPS to 15FPS with over 300 thousand poly model. More than half of the polygons were transparent, which makes rendering more complex.

New features in 3D Wayfinder include skybox, skybox textures can be set by our users via 3D Wayfinder. Skybox allows 3D floorplans to look more realistic and different kind of sky images can be used.
Our customers from UAE and Kuwait prefer sunny sky, for projects in Northern Europe we add clouds to make the buildings look more accurate.
Skybox can be set-up under Settings menu in 3D Wayfinder administration panel (CMS).

Some sample skybox textures will be uploaded to our blog soon, you are welcome to use them in your projects.