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Building 3D with Ikea

• swalsh 12y ago
  It would be great if ikea sold some of these model libraries for use in videos etc.
  • tincholio 12y ago
    You'd get a bunch of polygons and an Allen wrench :)
    • mankyd 12y ago
      Ållen
      • symmetricsaurus 12y ago
        'Insex' actually. But you were pretty close.
  • mrfusion 12y ago
    Or you'd think they could give them away for free. It would be free product placement in 1000's of games and movies, no?
  • deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
• bjelkeman-again 12y ago
  I'll never be able to look at an IKEA catalogue the same way ever again.
  • dahdum 12y ago
    Same here...it's incredibly well done but I can't help but seeing it as all fake now. Their showrooms are still real at least.
    • nkozyra 12y ago
      The showrooms are greenscreen/CG as well. Make sure to wear a green shirt next time.
    • sjtrny 12y ago
      The "real" photographs would have been heavily edited in photoshop anyway.
• borgchick 12y ago
  I am Jack's 3D hatred.
• johansch 12y ago
  So when do they take the obvious step of providing an easy to use 3d modeller where customers can model their homes using ikea furniture? They do have a tool sort of like this for kitchen design (developed by Configura in Linköping, Sweden). But I want something for the entire home!
  • leviathant 12y ago
    There's a very large selection of Ikea models in the Sketchup 3d Warehouse - I'm not sure who keeps things up to date there, but that pretty much fits the bill for what you're asking. It's actually how I designed my study, and I ended up rearranging the furniture three times (virtually) before deciding on what I needed to buy, and I'm so glad that rearranging was done on my screen and not on my floor.
  • rasur 12y ago
    Not really having paid much attention to how they did do their catalogs in the past, I just kind of presumed they were moving towards 3D instead of 'real' photography.. and I guess my assumption has been proved right (makes sense - it's a lot more flexible). I can only wait for a well integrated 'select the furniture for your own house app/site/whatever'.. which.. makes me wonder if they're considering some of the opportunities presented by VR or - better - AR (such as Meta and others). AR overlays of how furniture would look in your own home, would be quite neat!
    • mng2 12y ago
      They actually have AR overlays already. What you do is lay the catalog down on the floor, and the iPad app uses it as a size reference to generate the overlay. It's a little finicky in practice but still pretty impressive.
      • rasur 12y ago
        Interesting! I did not know that. Thanks for the heads up, I shall investigate further :)
    • 12y ago
• mcpherrinm 12y ago
  A lot of my furniture is from Ikea: It would be great to have this software for seeing how new room layouts look!
• neovive 12y ago
  The entire concept is very interesting and is a logical extension of the product catalog business (think about the impact of 3D and CG on movies, architecture, etc.). I've been experimenting with Blender and Skulptris lately and 3D modelling is quite amazing. A wonderful mix of technical and artistic skills. I wonder if IKEA will ever rethink their large super-store model and move towards smaller stores where you virtually walk into and interact with rooms and furniture.
  • kalleboo 12y ago
    > move towards smaller stores where you virtually walk into and interact with rooms and furniture I'm sure once Holodeck technology arrives, all stores will adopt it...
• bhouston 12y ago
  There was more information given on this at Martin's talk at SIGGRAPH as part of V-Ray Day's - but I can not find out if it is online anywhere: http://siggraph2014.chaosgroup.com/vray-days http://siggraph2014.chaosgroup.com/vray-days The renderer used by Ikea is V-Ray, the same renderer we have integrated into our online 3D modeling & rendering tool: http://Clara.io http://Clara.io :) Here are two simple Ikea-like furniture scenes which if you click "Edit Online" you can edit it in your browser, both the geometry, the materials and the lighting setup, as well as rendering it photoreal via V-Ray: https://clara.io/view/1d984b08-9711-4643-ae01-c3e53b174ace https://clara.io/view/1d984b08-9711-4643-ae01-c3e53b174ace https://clara.io/view/9fb1c2dd-0ff1-465e-bc64-fb8ac2cf7366 https://clara.io/view/9fb1c2dd-0ff1-465e-bc64-fb8ac2cf7366
• jlarocco 12y ago
  I wish they had given a bit more information about the actual workflow. Specifically, I wonder if they leverage the original CAD models? And if so, how are they converted to 3D Studio Max, and if the process is automated in any way?
  • marcobar 12y ago
    Hey - 3d artist here. When you're working with CAD/Solidworks drawings, you can import them directly into 3ds max as paths (2d shapes), and work with them in the viewport with accurate dimensions. I would be very surprised if that wasn't the typical Ikea workflow. Failing that, I've heard of some artists actually whipping out calipers to take measurements from real-world pieces, but it seems like that method would defeat the purpose in this case.
  • sawiemander 12y ago
    I went to the Ikea Vray talk at Siggraph. They are reusing CAD models but the key to photorealistic rendering is not the model but the materials. They use a capture and calibration process to feed textures into their VRay based shaders in 3DS Max.
    • jlarocco 12y ago
      Awesome! Thanks!
  • sawiemander 12y ago
    I went to the Ikea Vray talk at Siggraph. They are reusing CAD models but the key to photorealistic rendering is not the model but the materials. They use a capture and calibration process to feed textures into their VRay based shaders in 3DS Max.
• johnnyio 12y ago
  They should use Sketchfab for that. It is lighter and better thought for the basic user to see the 3d model.
• trhway 12y ago
  the photograph in the office with people - are these real people on the office or rendered models too? http://www.cgsociety.org/static/images/feature/ikea-onComp.jpg http://www.cgsociety.org/static/images/feature/ikea-onComp.j... A model of model rendering itself.... By the way, instead of home furnishings of different colors for people with Google Glass or similar devices IKEA can just sell an app which will color a furnishing (only in the image projected onto retina) into "bought" color whenever owner looks at the piece, Emerald City style.
• groovur 12y ago
  Even IKEA doesn't like putting their furniture together ...
• mixedbit 12y ago
  IKEA catalog in few years ;) http://www.shapespark.com/formikodesign/old-brewery-apartment/ http://www.shapespark.com/formikodesign/old-brewery-apartmen...
  • _archon_ 12y ago
    There's no refrigerator in this apartment. Also, I really want those chandeliers. That's a beautiful rendering though.
    • mixedbit 12y ago
      The largest door in the kitchen is the refrigerator door. Kitchen equipment with front panels matching the furniture panels are quite popular (refrigerators can be bought without front panels, panels can be then bought together with furniture to match it exactly).
  • kalleboo 12y ago
    Maybe even sooner. IKEA has a mobile catalog app which already has a bunch of interactive features like Augmented Reality furniture and a 3D shelf configurator. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uaxtLru4-Vw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uaxtLru4-Vw
• fizixer 12y ago
  In case anyone has about 30-60 minutes and is interested to get a quick glimpse of how easy (I guess meaning free and accessible at the least) it has become to do such graphics: - Download and install Blender 2.71 (http://blender.org/download http://blender.org/download). On linux (Ubuntu) I did not even have to install it; I just extracted the tarball and ran the blender binary. - Go through this two part ceramic mug tutorial (30-60 minutes): http://youtu.be/y__uzGKmxt8 http://youtu.be/y__uzGKmxt8 ... http://youtu.be/ChPle-aiJuA http://youtu.be/ChPle-aiJuA As someone who does not have graphics training, I was blown away when I did this. Apparently there is this thing called 'path tracing' based rendering, that takes care of accurate lighting, as long as you give the correct specification of geometry and materials. Some interesting videos: - Octane 2.0 renderer: http://youtu.be/gLyhma-kuAw http://youtu.be/gLyhma-kuAw - Lightwave: http://youtu.be/TAZIvyAJfeM http://youtu.be/TAZIvyAJfeM - Brigade 3.0: http://youtu.be/BpT6MkCeP7Y http://youtu.be/BpT6MkCeP7Y - Alex Roman, the third and the seventh: http://vimeo.com/7809605 http://vimeo.com/7809605 Brigade is an effort towards real-time path tracing, and it's predicted that within 2-3 GPU generations, such graphics would be possible in games.
  • bhouston 12y ago
    You know your stuff. :) BTW interactive path tracing-based rendering streaming into the browser: https://clara.io/view/1f7bd986-a232-4b42-8737-ce675093faa8/render https://clara.io/view/1f7bd986-a232-4b42-8737-ce675093faa8/r... You can edit the scene too like in Blender if you click the "Edit Onilne."
    • juretriglav 12y ago
      That's cool, but I think the real in-browser path tracing example using WebGL is even cooler: http://madebyevan.com/webgl-path-tracing/ http://madebyevan.com/webgl-path-tracing/
  • runeks 12y ago
    > Brigade is an effort towards real-time path tracing, and it's predicted that within 2-3 GPU generations, such graphics would be possible in games. Who predicts this? Path tracing is fundamentally different from rasterization, and I doubt that GPU manufacturers can transition that fast.
• mentos 12y ago
  Here are some realistic renders from Unreal Engine 4: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iO7Bp4wmd_s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iO7Bp4wmd_s Epic is encouraging all kinds of applications such as architecture simulations and not just video games. I'm interested to see how the engine can be used to do something similar to what Ikea is doing.
• wmf 12y ago
  This is becoming pervasive in the industry: http://www.wired.com/2013/03/luxion-keyshot/ http://www.wired.com/2013/03/luxion-keyshot/
• cyberjunkie 12y ago
  I wonder how active the 3D-CG scene is these days. In the mid-2000s there was so much activity on CGsociety (then cgtalk.com). The kind of work people posted there was just out of this world. Absolutely impressive attention to detail. I was an enthusiast too so I would visit the site many times a day. Of late, I haven't been in touch. Good to see stuff like this on Hacker News.
• cluster1 12y ago
  > We use every computer in the building to give power to rendering as soon as they are not being used. As soon as someone goes to a meeting their computer-power is used, and of course there is overnight when people go home. I'm very curious how they manage the distribution of computation?
  • wnkrshm 12y ago
    Path tracing is highly parallelizable, a ray doesn't need to know anything about its neighbors (there are integrators that give better results if more information is available) to be traced. In practice, each process just gets assigned a part of the picture and can calculate in until it's done, moving on to the next part.
    • wmkn 12y ago
      This is only partly true. Path tracing is an embarrassingly parallel problem but only under the assumption that the entire scene description can be accessed. When a light ray strikes the ceiling it can bounce off towards a vase that is on a diffuse table which scatters the light in all directions. So the calculation for this light ray needs to know the shape and material (BRDF) of all the objects that interact with the ray. Before sending out the ray from the camera into the scene it is unknown what objects are going to be hit along the way - as you can imagine is a difficult problem to optimize for. The usual solution is to just distribute the entire scene. On a single computer there is no problem, the entire scene is usually present in memory. On multiple computer it is more difficult since you will end up distributing large amounts of data (scenes can be multiple gigabytes).
      • berkut 12y ago
        It's really just a bandwidth issue - VFX studios do this all the time with their renderfarms - textures are the main issue - prod/archviz like Ikea stuff are generally really clean and don't have THAT many textures - whereas in VFX everything's dirty and generally very detailed so you're generally pulling in >300GB of textures per medium level scene. And at least in VFX everything's generally done lazily so you only read textures as and when you need them if they're not cached already - there's a bit of overhead to doing this (locking if a global cache, or duplicate memory if per-thread cache which is faster as no locking), but it solves the problem very nicely and on top of that the textures are mipmapped so for things like diffuse rays you only need to pull in the very low-res approximations of the image instead of say 8K images and point-sampling them, so this helps a lot too...
• igl 12y ago
  I am amazed on how this could be cheaper and faster than actually doing real life photos. The scenery and lighting quality is amazing though. Can't do that in a warehouse full of ikea products and fake housings either.
  • jkaunisv1 12y ago
    I'm also amazed. But if you've ever been on a photoshoot set it becomes a bit more believable. Sometimes the simplest shots can take forever to get right. Not to mention the number of people required - photographers, grips, directors, gophers, etc. Factor in the point they made about shipping all the physical stuff to a central location, all the different room setups (ie. American vs German vs Japanese kitchens) required and it starts to make more sense.
• emmanueloga_ 12y ago
  I was hoping this was about an app to build 3d things by mixing and matching ikea parts. I know there's at list one community around that idea [1] (and I've done it myself :). 1: http://www.ikeahackers.net/ http://www.ikeahackers.net/