The Architectural Cinematographer: Creating Architectural Experiences in 3D Real-time Environments

This paper addresses the problem of creating new navigation paradigms for experiencing architectural designs in 3D real-time environments. The exploration of techniques other than still images or fly-through animations is complex and manifold, and requires the understanding and skills of many disciplines including cinematography, computer programming, architectural design and communication of 3D space. In this article, we present the Architectural Cinematographer (AC), a first step towards new navigation paradigms for real-time interactive virtual environments that are intended to enhance architectural walkthroughs with interactive camera effects. The AC is a fully developed modification (mod) of the game UnrealTournament2004(TM) using the Unreal(TM) game engine and relies on the notions of architectural concepts, cinematographic techniques and game level design to structure the virtual environment (VE) content in a way that facilitates a perception of design qualities in virtual architecture. AC addresses the current lack of either software or a structured approach to facilitate this in real-time architectural visualizations.