3DVIA® - 3DVIA

Video: 3D Tour of New Microsoft Buildings in Paris

Under the category of cool things that you can accomplish with our very own Virtual Earth - 3DVIA 3D modeling application and Microsoft Virtual Earth, the above fly through was built for a presentation of the proposed Eos Generali building in the heart of the Paris business district.  We worked closely with several groups to produce the video including our old friends from Earthware (a.k.a. siege103 on 3DVIA.com) who produced many of the buildings that you see in the presentation.

Although you may not have the 3D modeling talent of Chris (Earthware) or Marc (3DVIA), you can produce the same concept on Virtual Earth today.  Everything you see above was produced through applications that are freely available right now.  The buildings were modeled with the Virtual Earth - 3DVIA version of our free Shape 3D modeling application and the "fly through" capability comes standard with Virtual Earth.  Marc has already promised a tutorial on how to produce your own that will be posted here soon.

The video was posted earlier on several sites including the Virtual Earth / Live Maps and Earthware blogs.  I like Michael’s second comment on the VE / Live Map blog…"It almost looks just like 2nd Life! I couldn’t help but notice that. It would be interesting to have a sort of 2nd Life in Virtual Earth. Where it takes place in more realistic setting and realistic people, don’t you? That would be neat." 

Interesting, don’t you think?

The 3DVIA team, through our Virtools group, just released what amounts to a game changer in the video game industry.  3DVIA MP is a entirely new game authoring platform currently  targeted at the producers of  top-level game titles on multiple platforms (XBOX, PS3, etc.).  In addition to absolutely stunning rendering capabilities, 3DVIA MP will significantly reduce the time and effort needed to produce high-end games.  3DVIA MP’s focuses on streamlining the entire game development workflow allowing producers to focus on game play and user-experience and not be hampered by the technology needed to produce it.

As Bertrand Duplat, Virtools founder and CTO for 3DVIA puts it, “3DVIA has taken into consideration studios’ needs when designing and developing games, especially those that work with large development teams in multiple locations.  Our new development engine encompasses the entire development cycle – from importing content to testing and debugging – maximizing publishers’ investments by allowing them to create content once, optimize it, and publish it across multiple platforms.”

If you are in the game development space, you should check out the 3DVIA MP site for all of the details.  Or you can watch this early trailer for the product below. 

The official announcement for 3DVIA MP was released yesterday at this years Game Developers Conference and the reaction has been excellent.

Just last month, Microsoft blogger Steve Lombardi posted a great article on 3D mashups created utilizing the modeling capability of Virtual Earth - 3DVIA combined with Virtual Earth technology.  He detailed how developers can embed Virtual Earth 3D maps into their web applications and use our Virtual Earth - 3DVIA product to import custom building models.  You can see the final result here.

Although I did not get a chance to post an article on his creation then, this week delivered yet another great example of a 3D mashup posted on the IDV Solutions blog titled “3D, or Not 3D: That Is the Question“.  The article is a great step-by-step tutorial on how to build 3D models for Virtual Earth.  However, in addition to the snappy title that I know he must have been dying to use, the article contains a link to the incredible mashup they have created on their own Virtual Earth a based application.  It is a great example of what you can be accomplished with Virtual Earth - 3DVIA and worth checking out.

Fans of 3DVIA.com might remember the IDV Solutions 3D building  model as one of our featured models in January.  Here is the model on 3DVIA.com. (click the PLAY 3D button to view it).

And here is the here is the same building within the IDV 3D Mashup built on what they call their “experiment”.  What do you think?