Hi there, I have been looking at the unreal engine software that is used for videogames mostly. It seems there is a lot of potential for applying this tool the architectural visualization. Does anyone know about this? Or has tried it for these purposes? Thanks!
awaiting_deletion
May 8, 14 10:24 pm
way back in the day I would change the game Doom to fun walk-thrus...WAD files...
You would be better off looking on gamer sites. Plenty of "city" and "architecture" engines out there and the connection to Architecture is often through 3dsMax.
LITS4FormZ
May 9, 14 1:15 am
Used it a couple years ago in school when I had more time to put into these kinds of things. Working more in Unity since it's lighter, cheaper to license and easier to use. Unreal definitely has it's strengths and comparing the two I'd say it offers a better finished product. It plays nicely with Max, the biggest hurdle is getting your meshes and materials to translate.
If you are serious about learning check out this book, it's how I got my start. And there are tons of free tutorials as well.
Game engines are great for visualization, but the learning curves are very steep. There are now architecture-specific solutions that make it much easier (Lumion, LumenRT, etc.). As real-time ray-tracing hardware hits the market in the next few years, we're going to see the whole architectural visualization market head this direction.
ziazia
May 9, 14 4:49 pm
Thanks!! I am gonna play around a bit with Unreal, it seems like previously knowing maya, rhino and grasshopper does help understand it. I am just having trouble finding a good workflow of bringing meshes from rhino to unreal while keeping objects with separate materials and orientation. Anyone knows a good way of doing this?
although he uses Unity 3D, not Unreal but at least he could offer some insight on the architectural purpose.
HeneryNadela25
May 12, 14 5:20 am
These information is very new to me, but after reading all the above comments, i am aware about it, many thanks for your informative post.
Gradinar Razvan
May 15, 14 10:43 pm
Game engines for rendering have quite the potential, however the high licensing cost makes them unappealing. With a game engine you could probably boost your delivery speed by quite a while, so let's say it normaly takes you 3 days to get a render done. Using a game engine will do it in 1 day.
Regarding Unreal, last time I checked, it had a major flaw It required you to "bake" the scenes before it let you move/look around. Which for complex scenes it's basicaly the same thing as "rendering" but probably not as long.
I do recommend you Cry Engine 3, compared to Unreal, it's free for personal projects and it has truly real-time visualization capabilities, basically once you place an object there, it's done. Plus it has a nice workflow with 3Ds Max, Photoshop,etc.I think they charged like 25% of the revenue if you wanted to use it commercially.
Lumion, Unity,etc are nice as well but the quality is far below the power of "traditional" v-ray or Unreal, Cry Engine 3.
Ahh and V-ray also has Vray RT which is partially real time, take a look, you might like it.
gwharton
May 16, 14 12:13 pm
Gradinar must be thinking of older versions of Lumion, since the latest version (v4.x) is equal to or better than Unreal or Cry for RT architectural visualization and much, much faster to set up and use.
I know that there was a visualization of JerryWorld (Cowboy Stadium) done by HKS about 10-12 years ago. Pretty sure it was the UnReal Engine. Deathmatch at the 50 yard line. Was great.
Gradinar Razvan
May 16, 14 1:02 pm
GWHarton, true Lumion is faster to setup due to it's user interface and prebuilt models like furniture,cars,etc. However quality wise Lumion is far below what Unreal or CE can achieve.Lumion has problem with it's lighting engine and the general GI, that makes surfaces washed out or have unnatural shadows or lighting.Don't get me wrong, it's still a great software if you have strict deadlines.
These are software used by professional studios worldwide to create the highest level of quality in industries like gaming,vfx and so on. The reason why they aren't used is due to the high licensing price when it comes to using them for commercial work as well as due to them being more technical.
The workflow involves exporting the project into 3Ds Max, applying textures, building a physical "cage" around the objects so they appear solid and people walking around won't go through them and then export them to either CE or UE via their plugins, and then reapply the textures, setup the lighting,etc. As you can see this gets quite complex, but once you've added an object you will have them permanently there similar to Lumion, so you don't have to go through that again, but still it gets quite complicated.
Here are a few videos to show the quality of these engines,especially CE and you will see their quality is much higher:
Gradinar: I'm not new to this. My firm has been running an ongoing test comparison of several video game engines and architecture-specific RT rendering packages for the last year and a half in a real production and design environment (e.g. not an academic exercise). We've specifically worked with all the main options, including Unreal and Cry. What we've found is that the work flow for the game engines is way too slow and unresponsive to change to be practical for design visualization. Also, the game engines (Unreal and Cry in particular) look way too "gamey", overemphasizing cinematic effects, and do not produce visual output that is appropriate for architectural visualization. The point is to illustrate the design effectively, not have the environment be so dramatically rendered that it's distracting. The example videos you linked show that problem very effectively, I think. Frankly, only one of those Cry Engine examples looks very good from an architectural environment standpoint. The others are distractingly moody and cinematic. Part of that is a stylistic issue, but the game engines are set up to do it that way because that's what game customers expect. For instance, it's great that Cry lets you walk through semi-realistic jungle weeds in pouring rain with clouds of specular lens flares obscuring the view, but is that REALLY going to help you sell your design to your clients? I think not.
The game engines are also not very responsive to design changes. They're optimized for the development of static environments for mass distribution, not rendered visualization of design concepts as working models that are still fluctuating. The time and effort involved in integrating a design change into a UDK/Cry model vs Lumion is orders of magnitude higher. That makes them poor design tools.
That's also related to interoperability issues. Most of our design models are built in Rhino or Sketchup. We don't generally use 3DS Max for design work because it's not a great tool for what we do. So, to export the design models into a format the game engines can use is cumbersome and problematic. Where with Lumion, it will accept models direct from most of the software we use.
And that's important because the point of using this technology is to allow high-quality interactive visualization easily and fluidly DURING the design process. Once the design is worked out, it gets sent out to third-party or in-house CG partners for full, in-depth rendering, since they can do it far better and cheaper than we can. The point of RT rendering is not to get you the equivalent quality of a professional VRay render (though eventually RT will begin to approach that as the hardware for RT raytrace becomes available), but to get 90% to 95% of the way there very quickly with an interactive interface. The game engines can get you there, but not easily or quickly.
And on top of all that there is the pricing structure. Game engines have a royalty pricing model which is incompatible with architectural practice. While Lumion is expensive per seat ($5,000 or so), but has no royalties or ongoing residuals attached to it.
Gradinar Razvan
May 16, 14 3:33 pm
It seams a debate has started :) , I'm going to break this down to make it easier:
"What we've found is that the work flow for the game engines is way too slow"
True, as I stated in my previous post Lumion is faster when your just starting out, since it has quite a lot of features/props already available, which when using a game engines will take some effort and time to get, since you have to create or import them one by one, but once you manage to build your own custom library, then it should be as fast as Lumion since in both cases your just laying out objects in 3d space, and lighting,terain construction is quite easy in both software.
"Also, the game engines (Unreal and Cry in particular) look way too "gamey", overemphasizing cinematic effects, and do not produce visual output that is appropriate for architectural visualization. The point is to illustrate the design effectively, not have the environment be so dramatically rendered that it's distracting."
This depends on personal taste,some people will like it some people will not, I for one like more moody atmospheric stuff, like The Third & The Seventh: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i15FjmqZxVI
"it's great that Cry lets you walk through semi-realistic jungle weeds in pouring rain with clouds of specular lens flares obscuring the view, but is that REALLY going to help you sell your design to your clients? I think not."....
if you like the more atmospheric stuff then yes it will help you deliver a more cinematic look, cause you could start with an opening shot at grass level, flowing through a small area with flowers or maybe start with an opening shot that shows a glimpse of the house in a puddle where you can see rain drops creating ripples in the water,etc...or maybe you want to showcase a house in different seasons then rain and puddles would come in handy, to sell it.
If your using this type of software as you said for real time time interactive visualization, and not actually providing architecture visualization like final renders or cinematics as the initial poster suggested, those being handled by another company or in-house department, then sure you can use any of them to let the client "walk-around" or view the 3D model and interiors, but in my opinion that doesn't justify the price for neither of them.
I'm not familiar with the workflow from Rhino or Sketchup and the mentioned game engines. I'm speaking from my own experience with 3Ds Max & CE, using this software I wasn't having any problems keeping up with design fluctuations, since my model was linked with Revit, so any change that was done in Revit was automatically updated in 3Ds Max, so I only had to apply textures in 3Ds max to newly added or modified areas and then just export them to CE where i pressed 4 clicks and it was updated.
The lumion workflow involved exporting directly from Revit to Lumion using their custom plugin, then applying the textures in Lumion, but before that I had to be sure to split/rename walls based on what texture I want on them since Lumion applys the texture automatically to all objects with the same name, so I had to rename walls that will be used on corridors,offices,etc...and it just ended being way more work.
The Unreal Development Kit license costs you 99$ to start up, if you make 50.000$ in the first quarter, you don't have to pay any royalty.If in the second quarter you make another 50.000$ then you are required to pay them 25%. Lumion has a yearly release, that requires you to pay an upgrade fee, if you want all the latest features, while game engines don't require this.
Breaking it all down, choose Lumion if you don't like cinematic breath-taking animations or renderings, don't have enough time to build an object library,you are planning on hiring another company to do the final renders, you don't use 3Ds Max, Maya or Cinema 4D in your production pipeline and you will make more then 50.000$ a year from rendering services.
gwharton
May 16, 14 5:55 pm
RE: the royalty issue
The way the royalty agreements are worded, an architect could wind up owing a percentage of the total fee for a project (not just the rendering fee) as royalty. Since most project fees are higher than $50,000 total. There might be a way to get around that by splitting off the service in a separate contract, but that defeats the purpose of using it as a visualization tool integral to the design process.
In the end, our legal counsel said, "no way" to any kind of royalty-related licensing. There was way too much ambiguity involved in how they apply the royalty terms to non-game projects. And do you REALLY want to have to open your company books to a third-party software company every year or quarter to satisfy a royalty clause? As someone who also deals with royalty and residuals terms related to the entertainment business, let me tell you that is an onerous and tiresome obligation.
But mostly, the biggest cost issue is the time of team members using the tools. When we did a cost comparison in implementation, the game engines turned out to be way more expensive to use than architecture-specific RT tools. "Building a custom library" is not something most firms can afford to pay for, since it's extremely time-consuming. This issue crops up to a lesser degree with BIM implementation as well. As with all software solutions for anything, labor costs are usually the controlling factor.
nadoga
May 16, 14 6:53 pm
In regards to the issue of Unreal Engine's royalty fees...
"No royalties are due on the following: Consulting and work-for-hire services using the engine. This applies to architects using the engine to create visualizations as well as consultants receiving a development fee."
The EULA states what revenue they consider to owe royalties, and architectural fees would not be one of them. This may be a newer approach since the release of U4.
UE4 is now free so that above comments are not so valid. I am trying to learn how to make this into architecture with not a lot of success so far importing from rhino but saw this guy that did it with 3dmax and maybe that works better. You can make quite cool real time renders, search for unreal engine architecture but if it is the case that I have to learn 3dmax just to learn to import in UE4 then thats maybe not a priority anymore.
curtkram
Mar 1, 16 2:31 pm
I was messing around with this from revit with google cardboard the other day. kind of neat. probably mostly just a novelty though. stopped before i could figure out how to get motion control on android.
as a somewhat unrelated note, the autodesk online rendering thing will allow you to render a stereoscopic view for free for a while, which can be viewed with google cardboard.
MinimalCrazy
Mar 2, 16 9:04 pm
One of my friends played around with unreal engine. After discovering the limits, his renders are very good, equal to hyper-realistic renders from Corona/V-Ray. I would say all three engines are very similar in terms of render quality, all depends on the user.
Hi there, I have been looking at the unreal engine software that is used for videogames mostly. It seems there is a lot of potential for applying this tool the architectural visualization. Does anyone know about this? Or has tried it for these purposes? Thanks!
way back in the day I would change the game Doom to fun walk-thrus...WAD files...
You would be better off looking on gamer sites. Plenty of "city" and "architecture" engines out there and the connection to Architecture is often through 3dsMax.
Used it a couple years ago in school when I had more time to put into these kinds of things. Working more in Unity since it's lighter, cheaper to license and easier to use. Unreal definitely has it's strengths and comparing the two I'd say it offers a better finished product. It plays nicely with Max, the biggest hurdle is getting your meshes and materials to translate.
If you are serious about learning check out this book, it's how I got my start. And there are tons of free tutorials as well.
http://www.amazon.com/Mastering-Unreal-Technology-Volume-Introduction/dp/0672329913
Game engines are great for visualization, but the learning curves are very steep. There are now architecture-specific solutions that make it much easier (Lumion, LumenRT, etc.). As real-time ray-tracing hardware hits the market in the next few years, we're going to see the whole architectural visualization market head this direction.
Thanks!! I am gonna play around a bit with Unreal, it seems like previously knowing maya, rhino and grasshopper does help understand it. I am just having trouble finding a good workflow of bringing meshes from rhino to unreal while keeping objects with separate materials and orientation. Anyone knows a good way of doing this?
i'd suggest you head over to:
http://arch.usc.edu/faculty/jsanchez
http://www.plethora-project.com/
although he uses Unity 3D, not Unreal
but at least he could offer some insight on the architectural purpose.
These information is very new to me, but after reading all the above comments, i am aware about it, many thanks for your informative post.
Game engines for rendering have quite the potential, however the high licensing cost makes them unappealing. With a game engine you could probably boost your delivery speed by quite a while, so let's say it normaly takes you 3 days to get a render done. Using a game engine will do it in 1 day.
Regarding Unreal, last time I checked, it had a major flaw It required you to "bake" the scenes before it let you move/look around. Which for complex scenes it's basicaly the same thing as "rendering" but probably not as long.
I do recommend you Cry Engine 3, compared to Unreal, it's free for personal projects and it has truly real-time visualization capabilities, basically once you place an object there, it's done. Plus it has a nice workflow with 3Ds Max, Photoshop,etc.I think they charged like 25% of the revenue if you wanted to use it commercially.
Lumion, Unity,etc are nice as well but the quality is far below the power of "traditional" v-ray or Unreal, Cry Engine 3.
Ahh and V-ray also has Vray RT which is partially real time, take a look, you might like it.
Gradinar must be thinking of older versions of Lumion, since the latest version (v4.x) is equal to or better than Unreal or Cry for RT architectural visualization and much, much faster to set up and use.
Here's a sample of what you can do with Lumion:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCMIHUWVx2w
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qx2KlyrZP_4
I know that there was a visualization of JerryWorld (Cowboy Stadium) done by HKS about 10-12 years ago. Pretty sure it was the UnReal Engine. Deathmatch at the 50 yard line. Was great.
GWHarton, true Lumion is faster to setup due to it's user interface and prebuilt models like furniture,cars,etc. However quality wise Lumion is far below what Unreal or CE can achieve.Lumion has problem with it's lighting engine and the general GI, that makes surfaces washed out or have unnatural shadows or lighting.Don't get me wrong, it's still a great software if you have strict deadlines.
These are software used by professional studios worldwide to create the highest level of quality in industries like gaming,vfx and so on. The reason why they aren't used is due to the high licensing price when it comes to using them for commercial work as well as due to them being more technical.
The workflow involves exporting the project into 3Ds Max, applying textures, building a physical "cage" around the objects so they appear solid and people walking around won't go through them and then export them to either CE or UE via their plugins, and then reapply the textures, setup the lighting,etc. As you can see this gets quite complex, but once you've added an object you will have them permanently there similar to Lumion, so you don't have to go through that again, but still it gets quite complicated.
Here are a few videos to show the quality of these engines,especially CE and you will see their quality is much higher:
Atmospheric:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbx018_0JuY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1KKgQdq_PRo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bHQeUtEXFs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eI2GGEGDc7M
Tech Demo:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SM6KW54cmhU
Old Visualization videos (2012):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EySdWbR4qcg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPd3e3ZWuBw
Gradinar: I'm not new to this. My firm has been running an ongoing test comparison of several video game engines and architecture-specific RT rendering packages for the last year and a half in a real production and design environment (e.g. not an academic exercise). We've specifically worked with all the main options, including Unreal and Cry. What we've found is that the work flow for the game engines is way too slow and unresponsive to change to be practical for design visualization. Also, the game engines (Unreal and Cry in particular) look way too "gamey", overemphasizing cinematic effects, and do not produce visual output that is appropriate for architectural visualization. The point is to illustrate the design effectively, not have the environment be so dramatically rendered that it's distracting. The example videos you linked show that problem very effectively, I think. Frankly, only one of those Cry Engine examples looks very good from an architectural environment standpoint. The others are distractingly moody and cinematic. Part of that is a stylistic issue, but the game engines are set up to do it that way because that's what game customers expect. For instance, it's great that Cry lets you walk through semi-realistic jungle weeds in pouring rain with clouds of specular lens flares obscuring the view, but is that REALLY going to help you sell your design to your clients? I think not.
The game engines are also not very responsive to design changes. They're optimized for the development of static environments for mass distribution, not rendered visualization of design concepts as working models that are still fluctuating. The time and effort involved in integrating a design change into a UDK/Cry model vs Lumion is orders of magnitude higher. That makes them poor design tools.
That's also related to interoperability issues. Most of our design models are built in Rhino or Sketchup. We don't generally use 3DS Max for design work because it's not a great tool for what we do. So, to export the design models into a format the game engines can use is cumbersome and problematic. Where with Lumion, it will accept models direct from most of the software we use.
And that's important because the point of using this technology is to allow high-quality interactive visualization easily and fluidly DURING the design process. Once the design is worked out, it gets sent out to third-party or in-house CG partners for full, in-depth rendering, since they can do it far better and cheaper than we can. The point of RT rendering is not to get you the equivalent quality of a professional VRay render (though eventually RT will begin to approach that as the hardware for RT raytrace becomes available), but to get 90% to 95% of the way there very quickly with an interactive interface. The game engines can get you there, but not easily or quickly.
And on top of all that there is the pricing structure. Game engines have a royalty pricing model which is incompatible with architectural practice. While Lumion is expensive per seat ($5,000 or so), but has no royalties or ongoing residuals attached to it.
It seams a debate has started :) , I'm going to break this down to make it easier:
"What we've found is that the work flow for the game engines is way too slow"
True, as I stated in my previous post Lumion is faster when your just starting out, since it has quite a lot of features/props already available, which when using a game engines will take some effort and time to get, since you have to create or import them one by one, but once you manage to build your own custom library, then it should be as fast as Lumion since in both cases your just laying out objects in 3d space, and lighting,terain construction is quite easy in both software.
"Also, the game engines (Unreal and Cry in particular) look way too "gamey", overemphasizing cinematic effects, and do not produce visual output that is appropriate for architectural visualization. The point is to illustrate the design effectively, not have the environment be so dramatically rendered that it's distracting."
This depends on personal taste,some people will like it some people will not, I for one like more moody atmospheric stuff, like The Third & The Seventh: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i15FjmqZxVI
"it's great that Cry lets you walk through semi-realistic jungle weeds in pouring rain with clouds of specular lens flares obscuring the view, but is that REALLY going to help you sell your design to your clients? I think not."....
if you like the more atmospheric stuff then yes it will help you deliver a more cinematic look, cause you could start with an opening shot at grass level, flowing through a small area with flowers or maybe start with an opening shot that shows a glimpse of the house in a puddle where you can see rain drops creating ripples in the water,etc...or maybe you want to showcase a house in different seasons then rain and puddles would come in handy, to sell it.
If your using this type of software as you said for real time time interactive visualization, and not actually providing architecture visualization like final renders or cinematics as the initial poster suggested, those being handled by another company or in-house department, then sure you can use any of them to let the client "walk-around" or view the 3D model and interiors, but in my opinion that doesn't justify the price for neither of them.
I'm not familiar with the workflow from Rhino or Sketchup and the mentioned game engines. I'm speaking from my own experience with 3Ds Max & CE, using this software I wasn't having any problems keeping up with design fluctuations, since my model was linked with Revit, so any change that was done in Revit was automatically updated in 3Ds Max, so I only had to apply textures in 3Ds max to newly added or modified areas and then just export them to CE where i pressed 4 clicks and it was updated.
The lumion workflow involved exporting directly from Revit to Lumion using their custom plugin, then applying the textures in Lumion, but before that I had to be sure to split/rename walls based on what texture I want on them since Lumion applys the texture automatically to all objects with the same name, so I had to rename walls that will be used on corridors,offices,etc...and it just ended being way more work.
The Unreal Development Kit license costs you 99$ to start up, if you make 50.000$ in the first quarter, you don't have to pay any royalty.If in the second quarter you make another 50.000$ then you are required to pay them 25%. Lumion has a yearly release, that requires you to pay an upgrade fee, if you want all the latest features, while game engines don't require this.
Breaking it all down, choose Lumion if you don't like cinematic breath-taking animations or renderings, don't have enough time to build an object library,you are planning on hiring another company to do the final renders, you don't use 3Ds Max, Maya or Cinema 4D in your production pipeline and you will make more then 50.000$ a year from rendering services.
RE: the royalty issue
The way the royalty agreements are worded, an architect could wind up owing a percentage of the total fee for a project (not just the rendering fee) as royalty. Since most project fees are higher than $50,000 total. There might be a way to get around that by splitting off the service in a separate contract, but that defeats the purpose of using it as a visualization tool integral to the design process.
In the end, our legal counsel said, "no way" to any kind of royalty-related licensing. There was way too much ambiguity involved in how they apply the royalty terms to non-game projects. And do you REALLY want to have to open your company books to a third-party software company every year or quarter to satisfy a royalty clause? As someone who also deals with royalty and residuals terms related to the entertainment business, let me tell you that is an onerous and tiresome obligation.
But mostly, the biggest cost issue is the time of team members using the tools. When we did a cost comparison in implementation, the game engines turned out to be way more expensive to use than architecture-specific RT tools. "Building a custom library" is not something most firms can afford to pay for, since it's extremely time-consuming. This issue crops up to a lesser degree with BIM implementation as well. As with all software solutions for anything, labor costs are usually the controlling factor.
In regards to the issue of Unreal Engine's royalty fees...
"No royalties are due on the following: Consulting and work-for-hire services using the engine. This applies to architects using the engine to create visualizations as well as consultants receiving a development fee."
The EULA states what revenue they consider to owe royalties, and architectural fees would not be one of them. This may be a newer approach since the release of U4.
https://www.unrealengine.com/faq
UE4 is now free so that above comments are not so valid. I am trying to learn how to make this into architecture with not a lot of success so far importing from rhino but saw this guy that did it with 3dmax and maybe that works better. You can make quite cool real time renders, search for unreal engine architecture but if it is the case that I have to learn 3dmax just to learn to import in UE4 then thats maybe not a priority anymore.
I was messing around with this from revit with google cardboard the other day. kind of neat. probably mostly just a novelty though. stopped before i could figure out how to get motion control on android.
as a somewhat unrelated note, the autodesk online rendering thing will allow you to render a stereoscopic view for free for a while, which can be viewed with google cardboard.
One of my friends played around with unreal engine. After discovering the limits, his renders are very good, equal to hyper-realistic renders from Corona/V-Ray. I would say all three engines are very similar in terms of render quality, all depends on the user.