After all my claims about being able to provide a housing developer with a web-based real time 3D visualisation I had better start putting my money where my mouth is! And that’s exactly what I did.

My plan is roughly the following:

1. In order to support my claims with visualisations and prototypes I must create the entire exterior and at least 1 interior space. Therefore I need reference material for a real life house to demonstrate how realistically I can recreate it in 3d.
2. Use floorplans and reference gathered above and model the exterior in a 3d modelling application(still debating how much of the exterior I require – garage, paths, gardens, etc.)
3. Optimise the model to balance detail with efficiency. I’m not really going to know the limits in terms of polygonal detail until I test the output on a range of computers/browsers and devices. I’m going to apply a relatively conservative 4000 polygons max for the exterior based on my previous experiments with WebGL, but the balance between detail that should be modelled or applied with texture
4. Create a series of textures and materials to colour and “fill-in” the missing details that couldn’t be modelled and light the house.
5. Export the house into a format supported by Three.js.
6. Create a working prototype with house and materials imported and basic interactive orbiting camera for inspection.
7. Test on a range of devices to see how the scene performs.

Check back soon for another update.