Architectural Visualisation in UE4
Unreal Engine 4 is proving to be an incredibly powerful tool and is particularly effective for architectural visualisation. Normally, because of the time required to render even still images in traditional, off-line rendering, all images and moving sequences have to be carefully budgeted and planned. However, using a real-time system like Unreal 4 removes that bottleneck almost completely. The animation above took about eight hours to render around 6000 frames of full HD footage on my home computer. This task would have required days, perhaps weeks, to render using traditional methods on the same machine.
Versatility is the key advantage that a real time engine brings to visualisation. For example, is the time of day not quite right? No problem – we can change that in an instant. Need a few additional detail shots for your presentation? Again – a few minutes is all that’s needed to export them, even at high resolution. Camera and dolly moves are often avoided in CGI as they dramatically increase both the render time and time required for corrections or amendments. But now any camera can be dynamic without having to worry about it destroying your render schedule.
This scene was built with a final rendered video sequence in mind. The focus was on realism and quality and as such it was too performance-intensive to be explored in real time. But after a day’s tweaking I had optimised the scene to the point where it could be explored in virtual reality. At this stage further interactions could be added if a client desired them – change the time of day, furniture or wall colours for instance.
What makes Unreal Engine 4 such an exciting tool to use is that the sky really is the limit for visualisation. This entire project, from start to finish, took a mere 10 days to complete.