Unreal engine 4 for ArchViz

[Scott Schroeder]

Scott, The latest Koola scene is available as a demo on the Unreal Engine marketplace. I checked it out and of course it's very basic and everything but it's so cool that you can render this almost instantly... I know Koola uses a gtx 670 and a core i7 (exactly what I have). Now think about the computer power you would need to make a 1 minute or more animation on vray or any offline renderer... In ue4 you build your lights, take couple mins at most, and you record, and the costs...are pretty much inexistant. Now I guess a card like a gtx 980 would work wonderfully with UE4. Probably my next purchase!

 

I find UE4 much more fun to work it though, it's fast, responsive...imo it make 3ds max looks like a dinosaur... Of course we need both softwares but the heavy work seems more fluid to do in UE4. Now I have a loooooooot to learn before making decent renders though :-S

 

Not to take a giant dump on everything. But..... Try convincing a client they need a NASA grade computer to run your UE4 scenes in their sales office. Can this quality run on a mobile device? How about the web? Until you can get that kind of quality across the spectrum of the public's computers/mobile/web devices, UE4 stuff like Koola's is just nothing more than eye candy to play with in the meantime.

 

Yes, it takes minutes to render an animation. Yes, Vray takes a lot longer to render the same animation. But guess what? By the time you've optimized and created a unwrap channel for lightmass for all of your objects to get into UE4, you've just taken as long (if not longer) as Vray would have to render the exact same scene. Now a change comes from the client. Gotta go back to square one again.

[RyderSK]

It does make other softwares look like dinosaurs :- ) The UI, the Asset browser, brutally nice nodal mat editor, super PBR shading system,etc.

But it doesn't make 3dsMax (or other DC apps) obsotele, you still have to create clean, arguably simple, well unwrapped geometry, and that's what gives this worflow a big minus for fast-paced large-scoped chaotic projects of Archviz.

[philippelamoureux]

At the moment i'm doing a proof of concept for an industrial designer and i'm torn between using vray or ue4. I know both will achieve better results than what he is used to buy from different viz studios. With vray, render times are killing me, and slowing me cause I do alot of testing. Quality is very very good tho. On the other hand, ue4 is blazing fast for testing stuff, rendering, previewing but the modeling/uv-ing is giving me headache and is time consuming like Scott said. It's like I can do very good images with vray but no animations and with UE4 I could do ok images and great videos!

 

I cannot test as much as i'd like with vray because of the expensive rendering costs. I'm working with 1 machine and would render with cloud rendering. Far from ideal but heh, i'm just starting hehe!

 

I'll post some of my work as I get more comfortable with Ue4.

[Chris MacDonald]

Then perhaps learn to better optimise your settings in VRay and invest in some additional rendering power? Outsourcing renders is expensive, I agree.

[philippelamoureux]

 

Even tho it does not have the same visual quality as pre-rendered/baked/etc.etc scenes, it's still impressive to see that quality running on such a device. I wonder if it could handle more complex scenes! (maybe by getting rid of the fish A.I first) haha!

Edited October 1, 2014 by philippelamoureux

[Simon Moir]

It's all pretty exciting stuff. I did a quick unwrap on a (simple) Max scene and imported it into UE4, it worked really well. It seemed a lot less complicated than I remember CryEngine being a couple of years ago. But I can see obvious downsides compared to Vray, mostly the whole UVW unwrapping time-sink. I wonder if anyone here has tried Flatiron?

[philippelamoureux]

It's all pretty exciting stuff. I did a quick unwrap on a (simple) Max scene and imported it into UE4, it worked really well. It seemed a lot less complicated than I remember CryEngine being a couple of years ago. But I can see obvious downsides compared to Vray, mostly the whole UVW unwrapping time-sink. I wonder if anyone here has tried Flatiron?

 

Flatiron looks interesting, I'm gonna give it a try! thanks for sharing because you are right, the uvw unwrapping is driving me crazy at the moment. Such a huge time-sink.

[RyderSK]

It's all pretty exciting stuff. I did a quick unwrap on a (simple) Max scene and imported it into UE4, it worked really well. It seemed a lot less complicated than I remember CryEngine being a couple of years ago. But I can see obvious downsides compared to Vray, mostly the whole UVW unwrapping time-sink. I wonder if anyone here has tried Flatiron?

 

I used Flatiron, don't expect too much. If you want the lightmaps to look decently nice (continous shading without any artifacts) you will be stitching them anyway to point where the auto-unwrap won't even make the work faster.

There is no easy solution, trust me, I've tried them all :- ). The baking approach is simply hell for any archviz production imaginable.

[philippelamoureux]

I used Flatiron, don't expect too much. If you want the lightmaps to look decently nice (continous shading without any artifacts) you will be stitching them anyway to point where the auto-unwrap won't even make the work faster.

There is no easy solution, trust me, I've tried them all :- ). The baking approach is simply hell for any archviz production imaginable.

 

I haven't been able to correctly uvw unwrap my 80k polygon eames chair yet...now imagine all the assets, it litterally sucks to do!

 

I'm going to give Xray unwrap a try. Judging by the tutorial videos it looks interesting and it only cost 12 euros.

Edited October 2, 2014 by philippelamoureux

[Scott Schroeder]

Auto unwraps are great, but in my experience they can break down if you use it on an object you didn't model yourself or the object wasn't modeled to have a topology that supports logical UVW unwrapping.

 

When it comes to lightmap unwraps, you still want to take a look to make sure that the most important parts of the model are taking up the most UV space. You don't want the underside of the chair to take up as much space as the top.

[philippelamoureux]

Octane render's ray-tracing coming to unreal engine 4. Not too sure how it will work but it sounds like it could replace the lightmaps baking...

 

 

Currently playing around with the lightmass propagation volume, (fully dynamic) but the shadows aren't THAT great. But we don't need lightmaps at least. :-)

[philippelamoureux]

A possible good news for us UV unwrappers!

 

"The upcoming 4.5 release includes eagerly-awaited features such as animation retargeting, automatic C++ hot reload, light map UV generation and streaming video textures. New real-time ray traced soft shadows allow for beautifully lit dynamic scenes, and screen-space subsurface scattering enables very realistic skin materials. Finally, creating user interfaces has never been easier now that Unreal Motion Graphics is ready to use!"

 

The automatic UV lightmap channel is already in but apparently it's been improved significantly. Hopefully it's going to be viable for medium-complex objects!

 

More details Here.

[alexisbosscher]

Hi just wanted to share my experience with Ue4. Here is a small test I made a month ago

 

 

Like you see it's a small scene but I think it can handle much bigger scenes then that. I'm preparing a bigger scene during my spare time to try UE4 on a real project.

 

The workflow is very different but in the end It's not that difficult or time consuming to make a second UV-mapping per object. Also I think over time you will have more and more assets showing up with the 2d uv-mapping already done, I can really imagine evermotion (or others) releasing low-mid-poly models with 2uv-maps. If this realtime stuff takes off there will be a market for those models.

 

As comparing Vray animation to Unreal: I think you don't see everything that's different with this workflow. In UE4 you have to prepare a 2d uv-map for every single object (this is time consuming) and then bake your lighting (time consuming) but once that's done you're all set: you can change every materials on the fly and make adjustments along the way.

Imagine your client wants to change the color of the floor or wants to change something else. In Vray you need to re-render everything over and over again. For a big animation you can end up losing money on the job.

If instead you use UE4 you have to prepare everything upfront and have proper uv-mapping (2 per object) but after this the difficult part is finished, you can just let your computer run the baking process once. After baking you can change every material like you want as many times as you want without having to rerender the scene. If you want to put some new assets in it or change / move something you will have to re-render you baking, but you won't have to uv-map again.

[Sauger]

I just started some testing of automatic UV-mapping in 4.5 preview, and 350 000 verts worked fine in 1 object, but it seem to depend on what size objects you export/mix in one group, since other models have failed even at sub 100 000 verts.

[philippelamoureux]

Hi just wanted to share my experience with Ue4. Here is a small test I made a month ago

 

 

Like you see it's a small scene but I think it can handle much bigger scenes then that. I'm preparing a bigger scene during my spare time to try UE4 on a real project.

 

The workflow is very different but in the end It's not that difficult or time consuming to make a second UV-mapping per object. Also I think over time you will have more and more assets showing up with the 2d uv-mapping already done, I can really imagine evermotion (or others) releasing low-mid-poly models with 2uv-maps. If this realtime stuff takes off there will be a market for those models.

 

As comparing Vray animation to Unreal: I think you don't see everything that's different with this workflow. In UE4 you have to prepare a 2d uv-map for every single object (this is time consuming) and then bake your lighting (time consuming) but once that's done you're all set: you can change every materials on the fly and make adjustments along the way.

Imagine your client wants to change the color of the floor or wants to change something else. In Vray you need to re-render everything over and over again. For a big animation you can end up losing money on the job.

If instead you use UE4 you have to prepare everything upfront and have proper uv-mapping (2 per object) but after this the difficult part is finished, you can just let your computer run the baking process once. After baking you can change every material like you want as many times as you want without having to rerender the scene. If you want to put some new assets in it or change / move something you will have to re-render you baking, but you won't have to uv-map again.

 

Hey man i've already seen your scene. Liked it alot! very good work. For me, the problem isn't the time spent UV-unwrapping, it's the unwrapping of complex objects that I find difficult. I have a high poly Eames chair I have a very hard time unwrapping because I have to make some seams somewhere so it doesn't overlap in ue4. Where the seams are, there's s break in the shadows that appear on the model and it looks bad.

 

I have a very good model of the salk institute (about 1 000 000 verts iirc) and i'm trying to import it in ue4. I'm breaking it into a couple parts and rebuilding it in ue4. It's going to look very nice I think. It should not be too difficult to unwrap since it's a very blocky type of architecture. Might wait Ue 4.5 to try out the auto UV-ing and my gtx 980 to make it even easier! I'll post my progress. So far, I have imported 2 buildings and the whole flooring of the site.

 

For the advantages of Ue4 I think you are right. More work upfront and liberty of choice after. It's a good model for small studios/freelancer because you don't have to spend $$$$$ on render farms or rendering services. Even if it takes 1 hour to build the lighting, after that you can make as many videos/fly-through/real-time as you want, and for free! That's incredible!

 

I've tested a scene with a metric ton of foliage, animated trees, rocks (using painter tool) and it was still playable. So i'm sure it's gonna handle big static projects. Just need to break it in smaller parts because otherwise ue4 freeze...

 

oh and I'm porting the Salk Institute in Ue4. More than 1 000 000 verts. My materials are temporary. Here's my 1st shots :

 

 

I'm using light propagation volume, less realistic, but fully dynamic and not as much of an hassle in 3ds max! I'll try the auto UV generator when I get 4.5

Edited October 7, 2014 by philippelamoureux

[jamestowne]

as cool an idea as using ue4 in arch viz would seem i dont honestly see it catching on.

 

unity is already popular with viz studios, people who have serious knowledge of unreal will generally work in games and the licencing costs can be a big issue.

 

most of all i found it odd that epic made an arch viz demo but they made it with game designed objects, all low poly normal mapped objects, it was actually surprisingly basic even for a demo.

[alexisbosscher]

@ Guillaume: thanks for the nice comments, glad you liked it.

Good luck with your project, seems promising already!

Keep us posted on the progress

 

I don't understand why viz studios would use Unity but not Unreal. What's the big difference? (I never used Unity)

[philippelamoureux]

Unreal engine 4 is royalty-free for commercial use of arch-viz... and the software cost 20$ Once, unless you really want every update, then it's 20$/month. It's hard to beat imo.

 

I agree concerning the realistic render demo, the assets were ugly. The only downside of ue4 at the moment, for me, is to make uv lightmaps. It is supposed to be fixed with the auto generate uv lightmap feature that's coming in version 4.5 next week! Can't wait!

Edited October 11, 2014 by philippelamoureux

[philippelamoureux]

Hopefully it's not a repost because it's bit old but here's a nice comparison between a Octane render video vs Unreal engine 4 real-time.

 

http://vimeo.com/93246664

 

Of course the Ue4 version isn't as nice, but i'd say to the eye of most of the population, it would look pretty damn similar!

Wonder what's the cost of the lightmapping in ue4 (in time) vs the cost of the rendering in Octane by renting a render-farm. The original video is 2:42 long. That's a lot of frames to render!

 

Also, once your lightmapping is done, you could render as many videos as you want for the same cost. So even if your client wanna change the flooring, or wall colors, or couch color...there are no additionnal costs for us.

[alexisbosscher]

Nice comparison, like you said someone not in the viz field wouldn't see the difference (my girlfriend didn't) so this is promising.

In this scene I think you can have even better results with even bigger lightmaps (especially for the walls) and less AO, so it could be even closer in quality.

 

But still a very good comparison!

[numerobis]

Yes, AO looks really bad. But i think this could be improved - and some shaders too.

[collidervisuals]

Hi guys,

 

Here is some of the Architectural Visualization we have done in Unreal Engine 4.

We encourage feedback and critique.

What do you think?

 

 

 

We took a while to figure out the workflow for arch viz and it is not a very efficient one. Unless, auto uv mapping actually produces usable results and real time GI is introduced (not LPV), it is not a viable solution for an efficient workflow. The engine also proved to be quite unstable and we had a lot of errors and crashes. If you don't have a deadline it is a good option for building a showcase.

 

Otherwise, is not a reliable tool yet for real life deadlines. The community is quite large and this leads to a faster engine development compared to Cryengine, so this may soon change.

[klonk]

Reliable or not, this has to be a peak into the future. Great job. Can you manipulate DOF in realtime as well?

[collidervisuals]

In UE4 everything is done in real time (DOF included), except light baking. Realtime post processing is especially fun to mess around with.

[klonk]

How does it compare to Lumion? I assume you must have looked around