Horde3D

Hi All,
A friend gave me a tip about Horde3D. It looks like a very promishing engine.

I am just about to select a new engine for Architectual walkthroughs like this one.
http://www.3djam.com/video3/video3.htm

To select the new engine I am comparing 4 engines.
- Ogre
- OpenSG
- TGEA
- Horde3D

Can anyone in this list help me to come up with a list of pros and cons especially for Horde3D but also for the other engines
to be the best platform for generating Architectual walkthroughs like the one in the video above.
Visual quality is very important.

Thanks

If you have knowledge about shader programming I think you can go with Horde3D. It is very easy to start with. A problem might be the import of the data. Horde3D currently only supports Collada, which is supported by many programs. Unfortunately not every exporter is creating Collada files that Horde3D's collada converter can read properly.

I only had a quick look at OpenSG and Orge and it seems to me that it is more complicated to start with, but when you have already experience with one of them you can use them as well I think. I think especially OpenSG might be more optimized for big scenes and it's capable to do cluster rendering.

OpenSceneGraph is designed for large architectural environments.
no idea about TGEA
Ogre3d maybe good too, but I never liked its performance for big scenes (my personal opinion)
Horde3d would need tweaking, I guess.
Everything depends on tri-count, lighting method (I'd use lightmaps if realtime lighting is not important)

Hi again.

Thanks for your answers.
We expect each scene to have approx 1 million triangles. We want a framerate on above 25 fps on a dual core 2 GHz machine and a modern graphics card.

Is shall be possible to change the sun light and electrical light thus dynamic lightning is probably the simplest to implement. And we avoid that the end user has to recalculate the lightmaps whenever they change something in the scene.
But a combination could be a solution if this is well supported by the engine?
We have a small and fast rendering engine for calculating high quality lightmaps.

I have experienced some problems with collada before.
Can you send a link to a good file conversion pipeline for 3D studio Max, LightWave 3D and SketchUp?

Thanks, Thomas

Personally I don't made tests with so much triangles, but I think it shouldn't be a problem in general. But of course it also depends on the way the scene is set up since frustum culling and/or occlusion culling may perform differently based on the distribution of the triangles.

Concerning the export: 3Ds Max is well supported by the exporter from feeling software: See also the wiki page and the documentation