At Maraizon International our job was to present realistic visualizations for architecture & design. We started with traditional 3d animations and renderings using 3dsmax. While useful, this technique was limited in it’s flexibility and time required to iterate. We saw an opportunity to leverage game engine technology to present our visualizations in real-time to our clients.
My job as the company's lead programmer was to research and develop this real-time technology. At first we chose to work with the newly open-sourced Quake 3 engine and tools. This gave us a great place to start, but it had issues scaling up to the size of data-sets we wanted to work with. Many changes were made to the engine to remove some of those limits, but after a few years it was obvious we needed a different solution. A new project, the SMUD Iowa Hill reservoir project, was going to be impractical and costly to build with the existing engine due to it’s massive size, dynamic content and rendering demands.
At the time there were not many other off-the-shelf engines to work with that met our requirements. So I began work on a new engine that could meet our demands, scale to much larger data-sets and leverage some of the newer, more modern rendering techniques that had been developed at the time. This engine was designed to be modern, high performance, lightweight and flexible. Being a programmer and 3d artist allowed me to design and build an efficient, easy to use asset pipeline that allowed our artists to get things up and running quickly with minimal training.
The engine was used in multiple projects and overall it was a success. It meet our requirements at higher performance, quality and with more efficient production. We were able to build things that were impractical or too costly to build in Quake 3. Each project allowed us to add features to the engine and I was quite happy with where it ended up.
Below are some examples of the projects created while I was at Maraizon International.