Planning and building a booth for a convention and exhibition like Siggraph can be very expensive, which is why designing in 3D is so important. For our 20 x 20 feet / 6 x 6 m booth we created the booth virtually in 3ds Max / V-Ray together with our manufacturer Exponents from San Diego. To test and experience the booth we used our newest product RapidPBR to convert the 3ds Max model into a universal PBR format and then optimized with RapidCompact for realtime viewing. It was especially helpful to experience the booth in Virtual Reality to get the real feel and understand dimensions, sizes of graphics and layout more naturally.

After finishing the design in 3ds Max with V-Ray materials we used RapidPBR to automatically convert the model into a universal PBR format. This conversion was fully automatic which means that we only needed to upload a ZIP-Archive including the .max file and related textures to the Cloud and RapidPBR fully automatically converted the file, checked for errors, adjusted material settings, created texture bitmaps from procedural maps and interpreted material settings to conform with universal PBR standards. No manual steps where necessary in this conversion step and the result was a realtime 3D model with correct shaders and textures, despite being still too big for web, AR or VR use with 35 MB.

The second step was naturally to reduce the size of the file and it´s polygon count, so that it loads fast on any device and it´s viewable in Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality. With RapidCompact it was very simple to optimize the 3D model using the ´SCREEN SIZE´ smart target feature. Setting this to 4k resolution and using WepP and Draco for texture and geometry compression resulted in a very small 3 MB file which still has sharp textures on the walls.

See yourself …

The booth in Virtual Reality

Viewing the booth in Virtual Reality on a Meta Quest 2 headset using the newly added WebXR feature in the RapidCompact 3D Viewer…

The booth in real Reality

… and here is a photograph of the booth at Siggraph 2023