reyanansari Posted May 26, 2015 Share Posted May 26, 2015 I guess this has been asked before but couldn't find it. So, a simple question " Which engine is better for Archviz " Unity or Unreal ? Experts advice needed and appreciated deeply Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Scott Schroeder Posted May 26, 2015 Share Posted May 26, 2015 (edited) They are both well suited for arch viz. The question you need to ask isn't the blank opinion-fueled "which one is better". You need to ask what do you want to do with it? Now, here's my opinion-fueled response. If you are looking to go to web/mobile and wide audience release and you have no idea if they are running a super computer or a Commodore 64, Unity has a slight upper hand. Unity can run on just about any device from the last 10 years so you won't have to worry about if your client base can play it or not. At the same time, Unity can produce some pretty high level visuals. If you are wanting to just do the half-empty room with way too much depth of field and nuclear bloom real time images, then UE4 is going to be better for that since it's got the edge in quality but requires a bit more powerful hardware to run. As far as using the program, Unity requires a bit more out of the box programming language and learning curve. Thankfully, they have great forums and most of the code you will need has already been written. Just copy and paste the code snippets and you are good to go. UE4 is a bit more out-of-the-box ready in terms of not having to know or understand coding. Edited May 26, 2015 by VelvetElvis Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nic H Posted May 26, 2015 Share Posted May 26, 2015 If you are wanting to just do the half-empty room with way too much depth of field and nuclear bloom real time images, lol. true. its a whole new genre the empty room with white walls and sheer curtains cant stand how blurry all the scenes iv seen are Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
michalfranczak Posted May 27, 2015 Share Posted May 27, 2015 We (Evermotion) are going Unreal path, it's more intuitive, requires less programming. (Spam warning, khem) Here is the link to our latest release for Unreal and walktrough videos. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Stephen Hughes Posted May 27, 2015 Share Posted May 27, 2015 Quick question for Michal (and please excuse my ignorance on the UE4 part), Say, for example, i had an interior scene modelled and textured in max + vray, and i wanted to produce an animation of the scene (4 or 5 camera segments)... My existing option would be to to render out the frames from max @ 20mins per frame but it would cost quite a bit for 1000 frames through a renderfarm (approx £500-600), or weeks on my own machines... So... If this scene was converted into UE4 what sort of timeframe would be required to 'bake' the scene (is baking the scene the equivilant to rendering)?? Do the camera paths render in real-time once the scene is baked? And in your opinion is this a viable alternative going forward for someone who wouldn't really benefit from the interactive features, or do you see the UE4 use in archviz as being mostly to benefit clients who wish to explore a space in realtime?? I know this is pretty long-winded but hopefully it makes sense. Stephen. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Devin Johnston Posted May 27, 2015 Share Posted May 27, 2015 Great questions Stephen, I look forward to the answers. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Scott Schroeder Posted May 27, 2015 Share Posted May 27, 2015 Baking light in lightmass is fairly quick compared to traditional rendering. Your typical scene should be around 1-2 hours, maybe less or maybe more depending on your system and complexity. You can also use Swarm and distribute the baking process over multiple machines just like you would DR with Vray. Once your lightmass is baked, you can essentially put a camera anywhere and render a frame. Lightmass is scene lighting and not camera dependent. If you are rendering to video, it may not be "real time" rendering as you would if you were walking around the scene. You'll have full bells and whistles on so the frame may take longer, but it's usually around the minute per frame mark. Again, this depends on your post-processing settings, frame size, and your computer speed. The big time sink? Unwrapping all of the objects in Max to have a 2nd light map channel for lightmass to bake to. Sure, you can auto-unwrap but you can see where this falls apart in about 99% of all arch viz done in UE4. With that 2nd channel, you want to make sure the surface that needs the most light information, gets the most information. For example a chair. Do you really need to give the underside of the chair the same size map as the top? Of course not. You want the top to take up more UV space than the bottom. So if you take the time to properly unwrap the objects, by the time you end up in UE4 you'll be close to the time it would have taken to just render traditionally. The upside to this is that once you do all of your library props, you don't have to do this in the next scene. You only have to do it on custom props to that scene. Since you are not wishing to do interactive, you can push your lightmaps to ludicrous resolutions to compensate for faster yet messy auto-unwrapping, but expect the baking process to take longer. Though, no where near as long as traditional Vray rendering. Whatever you do. Please, I beg you. Remember this sage advice. Bloom and depth of field is a privilege, not a right. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bulenthalibram Posted May 27, 2015 Share Posted May 27, 2015 Bloom and depth of field is a privilege, not a right. That was a good one Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Smile of Fury Posted May 27, 2015 Share Posted May 27, 2015 Ok, not to hijack the thread completely, but what is the benefits/difference between baking lightmaps in UE4/Unity vs just baking your entire texture and lighting setup straight out of Max? I guess the second option still requires a lot of render time and the first option gets you the benefit of the real-time engine's speed? And back on subject, Michal, is Evermotion considering just offering optimized models that would work well in UE4 or Unity? I see the benefit of having the UE4 library to easily bring into your scene, but from your side if you've already created low-poly models it seems like you might have a lot of Unity users looking for that stuff too. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
michalfranczak Posted May 27, 2015 Share Posted May 27, 2015 (edited) Hi! Stephen: I will do my best to answer, but please note that it wasn't I who made this collection, we have specialists from our studio who did this. I passed your questions to one of our cg visualizers (Andrew) and that's what he said: The most time consumming (except learning UE of course) is making proper uv for all of the models - each one has to have no overlapping UVs. Other time consuming thing is baking the lighting - unreal lightmass is similar to vray light cache, so you need a lot of resolution (samples are distributed per area) and big textures. If you bake with "production settings" but your maps are too small, you will get bad result. First you need to ask yourself: how long would it take to unwrap all your models (flatten mapping isn't always the option, because it needs huge textures and seams are real issue here). Bake rander time (for very high quality) can easily take up to 10-15 hours (you bake the lighting only once). Rendering is on the fly (to be precise, your FPS is the number of "renders" you get per second) Ben: We are entering new grounds with these collections, but I can assure you that if we will be happy with user feedback, we will provide more optimized Archmodels for UE collections. Best regards Mike. Edited May 28, 2015 by michalfranczak Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Francisco Penaloza Posted May 27, 2015 Share Posted May 27, 2015 I am so glade that Evermotion decided to jump in the game, this is the perfect suit for them and a great help for everyone doing real time in unity. I already have hell time fixing, cleaning and un-wraping REVIT models ... I don't want to spend more time in couches and chairs. Price is perfect too. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Stephen Hughes Posted May 28, 2015 Share Posted May 28, 2015 Cheers Michal & Scott for those answers, very informative, and i'm starting to get an idea of the workflow involved in going from traditional max + vray to UE4 for walkthroughs. Bit more work than i had anticipated but at least you've opened my eyes to it. While it doesn't seem a vital time saver at the minute for what i was after, i still think i'd like to use the workflow on one of my own projects soon - i have a feeling the UE method for archviz is going to become more prominent in years to come... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
philippelamoureux Posted May 28, 2015 Share Posted May 28, 2015 (edited) Baking a scene can take 15 mins or 15 hours depending on the quality of the lighting and shadows you want. After that you can do as many images as you want, as many animations as you want, etc. Doing post work in ue4 is also in realtime which is really cool. So far my workflow has been to break up objects in as many parts as humanly possible, then use a simple flatten mapping in 3ds max. After that I import my uv mapped meshes and proceed to make my materials in ue4. I'm getting good results so far. I crank the lightmass settings to the roof and use relatively high resolution lightmaps too (from 256 to 2048 pixels). Unreal can handle large poly count, it doesn't matter if I have a 80k poly chair broke into 10 parts! That way I never have overlapping uv's and I don't lose my mind unwrapping everything to perfection. It might not be a ipad friendly way of doing things tho. I bought a gtx 980 superclocked just to make movies with ue4!!! I have a question for Michal about the Evermotion's ue4 assets. From the picture I've seen they seem a bit lower quality (low poly?) than what we're used to from you guys. I have the feeling it's just better to buy your standard assets and tweak then manually for greater results. Unless the goal was to make assets that would run on different platforms? Sure it's a time saver but it should not have that ''gamey'' look. Anyway, it's still great to see you guys putting out content for arch viz. Can't wait to check out those full scenes! I suggest everybody to come and participate in the official unreal engine arch-viz subforums. Lots of great projects and tips there! On a sidenote, Scott, coming in ue 4.8 : Depth of Field effects have been improved to be more physically-based. Hopefully it will be the end of the disgusting DoF effect abuse! lol Edited May 28, 2015 by philippelamoureux Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
michalfranczak Posted May 28, 2015 Share Posted May 28, 2015 Philippe: in this first release we focused mainly on scenes, collection of models is rather an addition to it. That's why it's in low price (it will be available separately for €60, scenes will be for €120. Now bundle of those two costs €130 so basically customers are getting models for €10, how cheap is that? ). I agree that models collection could be more diverse, but for that price I think it's fair amount of decent models. As for plans for the future: It will take some time to analyze impact of UE bundle release. If we'll be happy with it, I can assure you that we will make UE versions of our models / scenes, so there will be no need to buy standard models and struggle with optimization for UE, we will do it for you And BTW, here are some single model shots from AM for UE vol. 1: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Scott Schroeder Posted May 28, 2015 Share Posted May 28, 2015 On a sidenote, Scott, coming in ue 4.8 : Depth of Field effects have been improved to be more physically-based. Hopefully it will be the end of the disgusting DoF effect abuse! lol No it won't. It just means it will be physically accurate over use of depth of field and bloom. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
philippelamoureux Posted May 28, 2015 Share Posted May 28, 2015 Philippe: in this first release we focused mainly on scenes, collection of models is rather an addition to it. That's why it's in low price (it will be available separately for €60, scenes will be for €120. Now bundle of those two costs €130 so basically customers are getting models for €10, how cheap is that? ). I agree that models collection could be more diverse, but for that price I think it's fair amount of decent models. As for plans for the future: It will take some time to analyze impact of UE bundle release. If we'll be happy with it, I can assure you that we will make UE versions of our models / scenes, so there will be no need to buy standard models and struggle with optimization for UE, we will do it for you And BTW, here are some single model shots from AM for UE vol. 1: Thanks Michal, can't wait to check out the scenes!!! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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