The making of Kelpie College's 3D environment representing Pict Harbour campus in X3D

  1. The making of Kelpie College's 3D environment representing Pict Harbour campus in X3D
  2. Landscape
  3. Tower Building
  4. Old building
  5. Seagull's eye tour
  6. Course Orchard

Introduction

Background

Some time ago, a simple VRML model was made of Pict College campus. Since then, VRML has been superseded by the X3D language.

Concept

The original concept was to create an online 3D environment in the web browser, that users could use to navigate (walk, use transport) around a reasonably life-like college campus. Where possible, this environment should make use of data integration with college information systems.

The following technologies are demonstrated:

and concepts:

  • declarative (markup-based) three dimensional modelling;
  • tile-based landscape;
  • building with reusable components;
  • prototyping;
  • efficient methods allowing quick download and rendering;

amongst others.

Screenshot of a virtual 3D environment showing unfinished buildings.Early version of Pict Harbour campus, showing incomplete buildings and tile-grid.

Methodology

You will likely need an X3D plug-in (or WebGL-capable modern web browser). It's been tested…

Source files

Some source files are available on the org-map-floorpan Github project.

Licence

Refer to the X3D source files for licence details, or the Github project above.

References

I found X3D: Extensible 3D Graphics for Web Authors to be an indispensable reference work for X3D.

Next: Landscape: making Pict Harbour campus in X3D.

Last updated: 2016-06-05.