Here is an archviz project I have been working on for my company Krysalis Habitat.
I wanted to share it with you, because I only used Blender and Unreal Engine 4 (and a bit Substance Designer…).
I still work with Blender and Cycle for archviz projects, but Unreal Engine seems to be an amazing tool for archviz. It is pretty fast to get believable results! And it only took a few minutes to render 1600 frames in 4K resolution!
All the architecture have been modeled in Blender, with a few add-ons such as Windows and J-Arch. Some assets come from UE4Arch, all the others have been made in with Blender (kitchen, sofas, tables…).
I have to deal with time, as I have a lot to do that isn’t just cgi… I think realism can go further, but with only a few days of work, I am pretty satisfied of the result.
Don’t hesitate if you have any questions about the process. I am greatly open to your comments, as I am willing to improve my skills. thanks!
Great work Krysalis! It’s impressive to see how far game engines have come in the last few years. However, if you have time, I would be interested in seeing a comparison between what you did in UE4 and Cycles. Maybe re-render one of the images in Cycles and compare the render quality and time it took to render. Just a thought.
Nice work but on the second picture shadows are very jaged…can you tell me how you export scene to UE4? You export all objects or one by one? In UE you create simple material or more advance?
Hey, thanks Acer for your comment. Yes Unreal Engine is amazing… I will try to make the comparison when I have time… But I think it will take far longer to compute this image… It took Unreal about 1 hour to pre-compute lights, and 10-15 minutes to make 1600 4k images. With no need to deal with grain, post-prod already done… And very easy to work with camera shots! you see the result live!
Maybe, there should be a way to get far better results with cycles, but it needs a more advanced bake system… I will take a look at it.
Hi raiden1983! Thanks for your comment! You are right, and this is my mistake, shadows on the floor are jagged because my lightmap resolution is too low…
To export the scene to ue4, it’s pretty simple in fact. I export all objects one by one except walls. I like to model all the house in blender, separate “indoor walls” and the outside ones.
What you can do to gain time, is to model your whole house in blender, and place every single element where it should be (Windows, doors…). Make sure you set all their origin to 0 (ctrl+alt+shift+C). Don’t forget to make at least one uv map for the lightmaps, using the “lightmap packs” UV mapping command.
Export in fbx every single object separately. Check “selected objects”, change forward to -Y and up to Z, and in geometries, change smoothing to face.
In UE, i have to admit that my materials are pretty simple… I think the minimum is to have and input texture for base colors, roughness and normals. You can go further, but you can quickly get pretty good results with such a mere material.
thanks!