Game style ArchViz entirely in Blender anyone?

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Hi,

I am working in ArchViz and do create 360 VR tours from CAD & rendered equirectangular high-res images.
This works well and gives a lot of image quality control. Personally I do not like the jerky movement which games usually have, but that is a different matter. Despite that things move more and more towards game style navigation within 360 tours and I like to give that a go.

All done by one person for a reasonable budget.

Not in Unreal, but in our trusty open source program Blender.

Does anyone do this? Do you have examples?
Can it be done entirely in Blender (apart from some post-processing)?
When rendering stills or animations in Cycles and Eevee you have a lot of image quality control.
Games tend to have far less elegant texture which would not be good enough for ArchViz. How does one overcome this?

Thanks for sharing your thoughts and perhaps tips and workflows.

Prettypicturegirl

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Anyone?

Btw. with game style I mean entirely the free movement through the architectural model.

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Game engine is gone and retired.
I would use Unreal Engine (I am actually). There is no doubt in my mind that UE4 is perfectly competent and widely used in the industry for architecture.
There is also Lumion and Twin Motion, but i don’t know anything about these programs only that they are for archviz and that they cost money.

You just increase the texture resolution/shader complexity and pray that the engine can handle it in realtime - since you have no game running in the background except primitive movement controls you have much more resources available for a simple archviz realtime scene than a game.

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Thanks,

Lumion is great but needs high end hardware and costs a lot as well as it needs an online connection. So its out for me. I was strongly looking into buying it but its pricetag does not warrent that.

Is UE 4 free and will it stay that way?

Interesting and good point you have on texturing. As a lot of my models come from various sources and are sometimes of bad topology, but need to be used anyway, do you think that would still work in Unreal?
Does unreal need a permanent web connection? I do sometimes have only a very sketchy one.

Regarding the game engine, there is still a section on this in the forum:
https://blenderartists.org/c/game-engine/10

Maybe I should ask there too?

Thanks for your input.

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One technique we have used a lot in the 90 game industry. Was calculating equirectangular map (cube map) so we could orbit inside at 360 degrees. And warp in between with shorts movies. I dont know if it makes sens here. But It let’s you ma age your renders as you wish…

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UE is totally free–however, if you plan to make money on something you create in UE, Epic gets a small percentage in perpetuity. It’s worth it. Great deal. Amazing engine.

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Good point & almost exactly what I do right now.

That what I do extensively for my real estate clients & architects.
My 360 Tour Sofware warps between the images, its not a film, but achieves almost the same…

Still I feel younger clients will ask more and more for freemoving game style navigation within the models & thats why I would like to learn to create that kind of experiences too.

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Does UE require a permanent web connection?

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I’d Google that, but I would think if you’re using Unreal, you probably should have an internet connection. There is so much to grab off the marketplace (for free and paid) at all times, there are updates, tutorials you’ll want to access immediately…

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That’s still a valid technique often used on websites and for smartphone and tablets since it’s easy on the hardware and can be done everywhere.

About that. IANAL. You have to read the licence terms, I think , but i could be wrong, as long as you don’t release anything officially to the public, but give it, use it or show it exclusively to your client, than you might not even have to pay anything. You have to take a look at it…this might even make Megascans available to you (for free). I am not sure. I only remember that their terms where very forgiving and nice to content creators.

Yes, most modern engines can process quite a hefty amount of polygons. If i remember correctly Crisis 1 back in 2005(?) had 1 million polygons on screen - not really a problem for today’s engines. And you can process meshes directly in UE4 and create LOD’s from them automatically.

No, you can run it offline, but it wants to connect sporadically.

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One more. My clients typically get the 360 tour made of the equirectangular images. Tney never get the actual models. Partly due to copyright issues 6 partly because I put a lot of effort in them and do not want to give them away.

I would want to keep it that way, at least to the extent that they can not take the model apart themselves. If I would create a tour in Unreal, can I lock the assets in such a way that they can not be extracted and be reused? (I guess yes, but I’m not sure.

Can obj & 3ds files be loaded into Unreal?

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Nothing is unhackable. Mainly base on gl or dx real time dump. But a simple client will not be able to do that with professional engines

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obj, fbx, alembic and some others, i am not sure about 3ds files. Isn’t that the old deprecated format?
If you are using Max, there is a plugin for UE4 called datasmith which is a bridge for DCC’s and which makes import/export easier, you should take a look at it (even if you’re using another DCC).

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In the latest Blender 2.83 3ds import is back again and for ArchViz that is just fabulous as there are heaps of free 3ds assets out there.

I’m not using Max. To expensive and you can do most of the same things in Blender. Autocad also keeps those handcuffs tight by their propriatory new 3D Max format .max.

I moved to Blender exactly due to this. Now I model predominantly in Rhino 3D and use Blender/Cycles for rendering.

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If I create such an animation in Unreal, will the clients need also high end game style computers or can the resulting ArchViz be played smoothly on kind of any hardware?

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When you start a project. You have to define a hardware target. For example if you want, your application to run on a smartphone you ll have to use limited shader for phone opengl. The type of processor or ram quantity or graphics card ll rule the number of textures you ll have . There size. The number of triangles drawn in the camera fulcrum. There is a lot of techniques to optimize your assets and you ll have to learn it .
But the first step is knowing your clients computers hardware.

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I share it here too.

You can use UPBGE 0.3 Alpha to achieve something similar.
Here is a quick test:

Basically UPBGE 0.3 Alpha is the former Blender Game Engine but using EEVEE as renderer, therefore you will see the same that you see with EEVEE. Addittionally, you can make a walk through or even a game with it (there is no need to programming).

Here you have the last builds: https://mega.nz/folder/t9EEFSaS#JPiOPSInCZyU-SW_-rhEOQ

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@Lordloki

That a truely awesome reply. I’m impressed. I was literally sitting on a knife edge :wink: when looking at it (the knife does not need to be a knife, does it ?)
What is the camera setup you are using? Its not equirectangular and perhaps does not need it to be. 28mm?
So yes, it can be done. Thanks for showing that.

Still, of course I have more questions :wink:

Stupid questions at first :wink: what does UPBGE stand for?
Will it continue to be developed?

Here some more, also for
@skuax

HARDWARE
Regarding end client usability. I will have no control as to what they use as hardware. My direct client (the middleman if we want to call them that way) surely would want the walkthrough to be able to run at most average computer hardware typical at the time of release. Certainly we can not bet on clients using a GTX 1080 or similar.
Personally I would love to have it run on medium quality smartphones under google cardboard or similar.
Thats the typical hardware end user clients will have. I can certainly not bet on them having an Oculus headset or similar.

For development its different I plan to switch to a Schenker Apex 15 with RTX 2070 (8GB), 64GB of Ram and a Ryzen 3950X in the medium term. So I guess there is no hardware bottleneck on that end.

END RESULT
@Lordloki.
Your result runs on a standalone player, which is great. What hardware would be minimum to run that smoothly?
Guess I would have perhaps about 10 rooms to navigate in a typical model.

Is the interface of the standalone player fix or can I get rid of the numbers on the top left and replace it with a more sleek and elegant dashboard or is that very difficult to achieve (I’m not a programmer)?

Is there a way to run this standalone player in splitscreen on a mobile device (Android or Apple) with Gyro?

Please keep in mind I am just starting to research all this.
I’m not yet set wether I end up using some sort of Blender derivate or Unreal or Twinmotion.
At the moment I typically model in Rhino & VisualARQ, add assets & texture & light (including HDR image on site) in Blender 2.82 and render in Cycles. Than I use 3D Vista to create the tours.

For reference and keeping in mind that there are some texturing deficits due to the maximum image file size to be used (speed vs. quality) here is one of my current tours & interior designs made with the workflow described above.
I’m based in Germany so there are some German words inside the tour :wink: Just had to remove my end clients details :wink:

Enjoy.

https://d7yoin4v8cpqf.cloudfront.net/index.htm

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I’m also looking for an ideal workflow for this. I have achieved it using Godot in the past.

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Interesting. What is Godot? Hopefully not the guy from the theatrical piece, that would involve a lot of waiting… … … … … …
Just found it. A free & open source game engine so, noidtluom, what makes you consider using a different one?