The Unreal Game Engine and the future of Architectural Visualisation with VR

Although the original cottage model had been UV unwrapped, there was still some work needed to clean up the UV tiles for the low poly asset. UV Mapping Unreal Engine relies on good quality UVW mapping and not solely for texturing purposes.  Lightmap coordinates rely on these maps to calculate light accurately and certain effects rely on unwrapped UV maps to work correctly. As well as reducing the poly count, I had to redo a lot of the UV unwrapping and fit the UVs across 5 tiles being sure to maintain Texel density.  Texel density is the consistent uniform scaling of UV shells across an asset in relation to its 3D world scale which maximizes texture resolution per pixel. Something to keep in mind is that high poly meshes do not require UV information if they are being used for baking purposes.  System performance can increase greatly when your scene is not full of high poly meshes with UV data.  Therefore, it is a good idea to delete this information bef...

The first thing to consider in the pipeline is preparing the asset for game engine interactivity.  Architectural models/meshes can have very high polygon counts as Arch-Viz up until recently has relied on ray-tracing renderers like V-Ray or mental ray.  Poly count isn't really an issue when rendering out beautiful 8K stills on a render farm, but for real-time interactivity it is vital to keep meshes as low-poly as possible.  Good texturing and utility maps can be used to bring out details. Polygon Count Reduction I am using Maya as my 3D content creation application.  For testing purposes, I have used an old Nordic cottage that I modelled a few years ago.  The roof tiles are all separate meshes, which explains the high poly count.  To get the tile details into Unreal, a normal map will need to be baked on to a low poly shell that outlines the main shape of the roof. High Poly version of cottage asset - 600K + polygons For the window meshes, a...

Throughout my research I will be focusing predominantly  on Lighting and setting up efficient PBR materials for Architectural Visualization within Unreal Engine 4.  Apart from the design itself, lighting and texturing are the two areas that can make or break the sale of an architectural idea.  That said, creating high quality textures and lighting can be a painstaking process and there is a time/quality balance to consider. Tom Shannon's excellent guide, Unreal Engine 4 for Design Visualization will be the main resource for learning the Arch Viz workflow.  The unrealengine.com website is also a great resource and will be referred to throughout.