UE4 for Visualisation. Ideas and Processes
polycounter lvl 6
Hey guys I'm in my first job as a full time Visualisation Artist using 3DSMAX & Vray. I started very amateur however I'm getting a lot better. I want to switch over to using UE4 visualisation exclusively for 3 reasons;
1) UE4 is faster. It takes longer to set up the scene, but once it is set up you can have videos and infinite renders, no dealing with render farms and waiting hours.
2) Market growth. More and more I'm seeing job postings for UE4 visualisation. At the moment I'd say the job postings are 50/50 between UE4 and VRAY and it's growing towards UE4.
3) Potential. I didn't do 4 years of uni just to do visualisation. UE4 opens up avenues for interactive design, which is where I'm really interested.
So first I want to talk about general approach and workflow and see what you guys think:
Materials: Poliigon and Megascans.
Both are faster and better quality than making your own textures. Megascans focus more on organic materials while Polligon covers more traditional interior rendering. That being said both will be supplemented with substance designer for when you require a specific material. Together they cost about $50/mo which is nothing. If nothing else they are a quick way to start a material library.
Materials will be either 2K or 4K.
Models: 3DSMAX, Archiproducts.bim & Megascans.
Again megascans has the best organic 3D models you can get. As well as they Archiproducts.BIM is a great resource for 3D models of leading design brands. That being said they all need their topology rebuilt and don't come with textures. Still having orthographic views or even a 3D model makes recreating these models much easier. This is the most time consuming part of the process as I'm going to need a decent amount models.
Models are around 11K Polys.
Workflow:
Build basic layout in 3DSMAX and import to unreal. Populate with materials and models from personal library. Lighting, bake, render. Will also need to get pretty good with UE4 Cameras.
INTERESTING PART:
Okay so now for the main point of this thread. Brainstorming interactive visualisation ideas. The excitement of seeing a real-time photoreal apartment is long gone. We need more exciting scenes to engage users. The obvious ones are material & model changes in game. A good idea that isn't going anywhere soon.
Another one I've seen more rarely is day/dusk comparison. I would like to see a timelapse of lighting moving through the house or an interactive clock that accurately depicts the suns position.
A lot harder to do is letting users design their own homes in a sims type of way. What I noticed in my job is that users who design their own product are far more likely to purchase them (we're talking about $150,000 jobs) . Let them build and share their creations. Apply all the above the VR as well.
That's all I really have at the moment however, does anyone else have any thoughts?
1) UE4 is faster. It takes longer to set up the scene, but once it is set up you can have videos and infinite renders, no dealing with render farms and waiting hours.
2) Market growth. More and more I'm seeing job postings for UE4 visualisation. At the moment I'd say the job postings are 50/50 between UE4 and VRAY and it's growing towards UE4.
3) Potential. I didn't do 4 years of uni just to do visualisation. UE4 opens up avenues for interactive design, which is where I'm really interested.
So first I want to talk about general approach and workflow and see what you guys think:
Materials: Poliigon and Megascans.
Both are faster and better quality than making your own textures. Megascans focus more on organic materials while Polligon covers more traditional interior rendering. That being said both will be supplemented with substance designer for when you require a specific material. Together they cost about $50/mo which is nothing. If nothing else they are a quick way to start a material library.
Materials will be either 2K or 4K.
Models: 3DSMAX, Archiproducts.bim & Megascans.
Again megascans has the best organic 3D models you can get. As well as they Archiproducts.BIM is a great resource for 3D models of leading design brands. That being said they all need their topology rebuilt and don't come with textures. Still having orthographic views or even a 3D model makes recreating these models much easier. This is the most time consuming part of the process as I'm going to need a decent amount models.
Models are around 11K Polys.
Workflow:
Build basic layout in 3DSMAX and import to unreal. Populate with materials and models from personal library. Lighting, bake, render. Will also need to get pretty good with UE4 Cameras.
INTERESTING PART:
Okay so now for the main point of this thread. Brainstorming interactive visualisation ideas. The excitement of seeing a real-time photoreal apartment is long gone. We need more exciting scenes to engage users. The obvious ones are material & model changes in game. A good idea that isn't going anywhere soon.
Another one I've seen more rarely is day/dusk comparison. I would like to see a timelapse of lighting moving through the house or an interactive clock that accurately depicts the suns position.
A lot harder to do is letting users design their own homes in a sims type of way. What I noticed in my job is that users who design their own product are far more likely to purchase them (we're talking about $150,000 jobs) . Let them build and share their creations. Apply all the above the VR as well.
That's all I really have at the moment however, does anyone else have any thoughts?
Replies
https://www.polygon.com/2017/3/1/14777806/gdc-epic-rogue-one-star-wars-k2so
http://www.cartoonbrew.com/tools/real-time-rendering-changing-vfx-animation-production-153091.html
This is the future. I wonder what will happen to offline renderers.
https://80.lv/articles/vray-for-unreal-engine-4/
If I had to quantify the advantages of both:
VRAY:
- Easier to achieve photo-real results.
- More powerful material shaders.
- Forest Pro
- Built into 3dsMAX
Unreal:
- Infinite Renders.
- Instant Video saving thousands of hours and dollars.
- Final results in editor.
- Easy Ambient Animations (Trees)
- Interactivity (VR + Walkthrough)
- Blue Prints for more advanced interaction.
Mind you this is just after being told it's going to cost $5000 to render a low resolution fly through render in VRAY. Stuff Vray I'm making the move to unreal asap. Really the only thing holding it back for me is the 3DSMAX to unreal workflow (double UV's + Configuring Materials). which sounds like it will be solved soon anyway!
Additionally, bear in mind that Vray is a one off cost. Suitable for a studio that works all year, whilst UE4 is a 5% commercial cost from your profit on every single product... in the long term UE4 would be more expensive.
100 renders produced by Vray for £650.00 workstation license.
100 renders produced by Vray at 5% cost if they were 1K each - 5K?
The future is no offline rendering, but Vray will be adopting their workflow to suit this, especially since they've just bought Corona.
I still love the argument of Unreal is so fast at render time! But it takes me +4 weeks to get my model into it, but look at the render time I've saved. Or Vray is too damn expensive, so I bought at $15,000 rig to render my unreal scenes on.
Datasmith is going to really bridge the gap in the time it takes to get into unreal, but they still haven't shown it on your a-typical client request of "I have this ArchiCAD file that my 16 year old nephew did for me and I want to see this all in real time by tomorrow morning" workflow.
If VRAY makes the shift to real time rendering, than I will have absolutely 0 issue with VRAY.
They simply need to optimize the process of getting your scenes into unreal, which you've already mentioned. I also think unreal handles material in a better way and is generally easier to use than 3DSMAX material system.
Honestly I would love to be a game artist, but there is no industry in my country, so I go for viz. This makes me want to lean towards Unreal. In 5 years time I don't want to be sitting at a computer churning out renders, I want to be developing interactive apps for clients and immersive experiences.
Unreal has a greater range of GI options and also has decent plugins (not needed however). Out of the box I feel UE4 is better tuned.
As for Exterior...
Long video but extremely interesting. They made a huge range of optimisations to the engine to allow for more realistic exterior rendering. At this point the limiting factor is not the engine but the quality of your materials and textures.
Unity can achieve similar results but as you have noticed it's a lot less straight forward and involves a lot of 3rd party plugins and software.
VRAY is also working with Unreal to get 1 click import/export between scenes.
I've seen this type of discussion before (on places like this and on archviz forums) and a few things that a lot of people seem to disregard is the fact that you can't just throw stuff into Unreal/Unity and get finished images. It takes a lot of preparation and time. Also, when doing archviz in VRay (or Corona in my case), you can get almost anything already modeled and ready to plop into a scene and be finished. I work at an architect firm and the architects are always changing their minds and every time it happens it's back to finding (or modeling) a model, prepare it for realtime. It takes time. And the biggest thing is: 95% of what I do, and many in the business do, is made for print. Setting up everything in Unreal, with people and tons of small adjustmenst, just to get 1 or 2 still images is just silly. The way it's going now, offline renderers will soon be "realtime" anyway, which removes the need for Unreal or Unity, unless you want interactivity.
Most stuff is print presentation, but that will change over the next decade. The reason things move slowly is because senior artists don't like to change tools / workflows. You still see plenty of companies using photoshop to do renders, adding cut outs to images etc. So it only moves as fast as those artists retire in a lot of cases.
Regardless there is a growing place in the market for Unreal. At the moment there are as many traditional visualisation jobs as their are "Unreal Engine 4 Artist" jobs where I am. Smooth workflow between VRAY and Unreal will be key.
I believe that landscape was made with around 15 or so people. A lot of time went into coding the new features and going out on site to do photogammatry. I believe it would be possible for 1 person to make that landscape with pre made assets (and all the code is now there).
Maybe not the AI Deer!