From Revit to Unreal Engine - Step by Step

hey everyone jeff here also known as the revit kid welcome to another episode of bim after dark live this is episode 48 believe it or not 48 so we're coming up on episode 50 which is pretty wild um today's episode i have an awesome guest and we're going to be talking about the revit to unreal engine workflow it's going to be really cool uh i think i believe that that carl our guest is going to be using one of my models i sent him which is pretty cool to see a model that i sent him go through the workflow but then we're also going to talk about why and maybe some of the reasons of uh you might want to use unreal so definitely stay tuned it's going to be really cool he's also going to be throwing on some vr headsets as long as nothing blows up on us because this is a live stream so stick around and uh and definitely uh definitely stay tuned for for what's what's to come um i also want to make mention that if you are new to this episode or new to this channel i should say this is a weekly live stream where we talk about revit bim and any really associated software in the aec industry and if it is your first time here make sure you subscribe to the channel here on youtube hit the notification bell hit the subscribe so you know when we go live this is typically every week every thursday for almost a year now which is pretty sweet before we jump into the contents i did want to thank our sponsor our sponsor is bimbox for those of you not familiar with what bimbox is they are a computer manufacturer they make laptops and desktops for the aec industry the the big difference about bimbox um between or the big difference from other uh laptops or desktops that you may be currently using right now is that they have been designed and optimized for revit that's right if someone asks you what's the best laptop or desktop for revit then i finally have an answer because these literally have been designed for it if you don't believe me you can go over to their website and they have a benchmark where you can compare it to your desktop or your laptop as well one little story i wanted to tell about bimbox before we jump into it is they also look really good if you haven't seen them check out the website actually let me uh pull up the little thing here uh so so check out the website and um and see the especially the desktops the design of the desktops i'm actually in in the process of of sort of moving the offices uh my office around here in the house and i'm literally designing my desk around where the bin box is gonna sit because it looks so cool and it's one of those things that you just don't want to hide back in the corner so head on over to sales at bimboxusa.com email those guys buck and his crew if you're interested let them know that uh you heard it here on the channel from me and they'll hook you up you can also head on over to bimbox.bimafterdark.com to find out more so thank you bimbox thank you for uh sponsoring this episode for sure um before we jump in i also wanted to remind you guys that we are live right now so i will be checking the chat the entire time and i fully encourage engagement ask questions um interrupt us doesn't matter i will i will be paying attention and the reason i love doing these streams is because i get to talk to you speaking of um i'm gonna introduce my guests right now so uh carl's gonna come on screen here uh speaking of sort of the interactions uh between my uh audience and myself here on the live stream um carl actually has been a a pretty active commenter uh over a few episodes of the of the channel and um he actually um submitted an idea to me um for those of you that don't know i think i mentioned a couple episodes if you head to submit.bimafterdark.com there's a submission form if you have an idea and you want to be on the show and carl reached out and long story short we actually have a little bit of a history online and uh and i thought it was great he mentioned unreal as something that he's been into and so without further ado i will introduce carl gibson what's up carl hey jeff how you doing all right all right um thank you for coming on uh and thank you for for submitting an idea um it was pretty awesome to see that that uh people were interested in submitting their own ideas and not me having to reach out for guests which is pretty cool but also that you are interested in unreal and it's it's one of those things that i think people out there are super interested in the workflow and just in general even the program itself so um thanks for coming on i really appreciate it yeah thanks for having me it's uh pretty exciting to be here yeah it's kind of hard to um ignore like even the 50 and 60 year olds at the booths at the conventions they're like vr set this is interesting that's like the bet that i have how many how many people older than 50 can i get in a vr headset right right right so it's pretty intriguing to like to everybody to experience something like that yes i i know i know when we um you know pre pandemic i'm sorry i'm actually sorry guys i just moved carl's face a little so don't freak out that was me i was making sure your whole head was in the stream um so so pre-pre pandemic you know we did a ton of vr meetings it was you know it was it was really um becoming almost a common practice for us and it was really interesting to see because not everyone in the meeting will ever put the goggles on there's some people that would just refuse to put them on right but it was always interesting to see like who in the room were the ones that enjoyed it the most that got it right away and and it's a fascinating process so this is courageous exactly exactly i'm just i'm just reading some of the comments as we go here we got some some uh regulars beth ann uh welcome back um well creative things with carl's on here commenting on which is awesome and uh florida we got some folks from england i saw there uh japan hey ren from japan thanks for joining us pretty cool it must be i don't know is it tomorrow morning in japan i don't even right it's it's a different day so thanks for joining us live appreciate it all right so before before we jump into content and and again i want to encourage everyone to ask questions as we go along carl's got a bunch of great stuff lined up uh uh you know pre-ready to go demo stuff um but we do encourage um engagement and take us whatever direction you want but i guess before um oh and joe buck hey joe joe's actually a connecticut native what's up joe um he just asked if that was the kimball um art museum and yeah good eye he got it yep louis khan good stuff um and we were actually just talking about uh our backgrounds and how mine is now a much darker background and uh carl's is is not a real background and it's because both of our offices are in complete disarray right now so oh australia wow cool man awesome awesome oh ren said it's 9 30 in the morning so it's actually nice and early in the morning the next day all the time zones we're all over the place awesome all right so so before we jump into the unreal stuff i guess uh real quickly um you know give give folks a little background of who you are maybe know what you do professionally um you know how you got to uh i guess to unreal and then some of the some of the background on on the revit universe that you've been involved in and i bet some people may recognize you from some of your your your endeavors but they may not even simply possibly it'll be a tell as to how long they've been using revit if they recognize me um so yeah thanks for having me jeff um i'm carl gibson i'm here in tulsa oklahoma uh i started my endeavor with revit 2005. man i should have thought it i actually have the revit 2006 purple and white manual in the room with me but it's like back in the box was that spiral bound no it was not spiral bound i remember i remember one i think it was 2008 i had some spiral bound one it was it was a pretty wild book yeah maybe we printed it and that's why i don't know possibly yeah uh but i've been using revit ever since um and it's kind of how i've stayed in the industry um i i'm a licensed architect i use revit for a residential commercial uh and it's kind of uh i've been a bim manager for for large projects large firms small firms small projects things like that uh back in 2008 i started a blog i guess you could call it called revit tip of the day uh and that went on for a few years until carl bass uh sicked his lawyers on me and that then it became creative things um and creative things is the name of the the studio that i run now uh out of my disarray of an office at my house um and over the last couple years i've started thinking about like in architecture how do we communicate and like what's the next step of communication you know you've got renderings you've got twin motion you've got uh well if if you were like me you actually rendered things directly in revit before there was actually a really good like you had your computer running 48 hours straight uh to do that to do that mental ray uh rendering oh yeah i remember in studio in studio we used to have um you know we would get pissed off because you have to go in and print and there'd be signs all over the machines and someone was in the lab and they you know rendering rendering rendering and you just want to pull the plug on them yep well sometimes nature does that for you yeah yeah lightning storms and powers power outages and stuff like that a processor overheating you know yeah yeah yeah fantastic um but uh recently i started thinking about well what's that next level like when you're talking to a client you're looking at a flat image well how do they know that that space between the island and the kitchen and the stove is enough to have somebody you know prepping food in the sink and pulling the turkey out of the oven at the same time you know well vr was kind of the next step for that because you can put them in an immersive environment and you can actually with your controllers feel your brain can feel how wide that space is or how tall a space is it's hard to explain without that for people who haven't been in vr how immersive it is and how you can actually like your body knows is that a tall ceiling or a short ceiling uh so that was the the next step for me really in communicating to my clients this is what your space is going to look like and we try to get that to them you know really early uh in the process um so i started playing with you know twin motion illumion had some very basic vr capabilities where you could put the headset on and kind of look around in his face uh but uh i started looking at actually believe it or not i started looking at unity first because they were kind of tied in with steam right and i and i had a steam uh i have a vive that i'm using um which is steam htc um but then i found that unreal was just it's and you'll see in the demonstration it's so easy to get set up and go they've worked really hard to make their templates basically work out of the box with the exception of as you'll see when they tweak it and sometimes it doesn't but most of the time it does work and really what really kind of tipped me over the edge of going from you know just staying in twin motion and enscape which i think inscape has some of these features but at the time it didn't uh when i was looking at unreal was i wanted to be able to change materials and move things around and you didn't have that functionality at the time it's interacting with interacting with the environment right the the ability to interact with the environment yeah and does enscape have that now i can't i i feel like i've heard that it does i don't know no so so you're you're you're get they're getting closer um and and the views now you can you can associ it's a lot easier to associate views to what you're seeing so you can flip between design options for example much easier now um so there's that but you can't you know there's no and even in twin motion there's there's still some extent of you can change materials but you can't you know grab an object and move it you know that that's that that's just not built into the vr platform and right that they have right right yeah so um it's not and it's not as straightforward and unreal to change materials and what not as it is to just like get vr working right but it the with its blueprint system where you can literally code by node so if you're familiar with grasshopper or dynamo it's a very similar programming structure where you can actually program via nodes and i can show a little bit of that we won't get into actually creating blueprints but um i can kind of show you how that works and what that looks like behind the scenes in the engine awesome why don't we do this then why don't we uh why don't we jump in and show uh uh the final product real quick just so everyone can get a taste of what we're going through and then maybe we'll work backwards and and run through um you know how you get there because i think i think everyone is probably maybe for those that aren't familiar with unreal maybe just want to see like what's the end goal here and then and then from there uh maybe we'll work backwards and sort of talk about okay this was a rabbit model this is how we got there how about that absolutely let's do it let's do it all right so we're seeing your screen um by the way carl is using an ultra wide so i apologize everyone who has the cinematic screen on the top but uh i don't apologize for that everyone should have ultra wide why do you have a bar between your monitors exactly right all right so what we're seeing here this is actually in unreal engine and this is the uh final model that um that we're actually going to build a little bit later on but this is what we're going to be trying to get to uh in the time slot that we have and essentially what i've done is i've started from a template um and to create this so i can just hit play here and i don't know if you're hearing the desktop audio or not there should be a uh let me i need to run this into my headphones real quick there we go uh so this is essentially me using wasd to walk around uh a model which if you've been watching revit kid bim after dark for a while this might look familiar to you this setting might look a little different we have put it uh on a frozen lake in the middle of the tundra but not not quite connecticut not quite connecticut but it could be depending on the time of year yeah yeah depending on the time of year maybe maybe um some things that you might notice is these are not the revit materials i've done material swaps um i've done some lighting i've baked some lighting in you will notice some things like jeff i'm sure you noticed that this material probably shouldn't be there because you demolished that and made it into parts and we'll get into some of those uh later on but what i do want to show real quick is so you can see that this this is what epic calls the an epic is the company that makes unreal engine they call this a collaborative viewer template uh so you have a couple different modes you've got the fly mode and i can you know i can fly way above the house uh whatnot you know i can go through walls and everything or i can walk so i've got some collisions set up so i can walk on the floors i didn't set up collisions with the walls but you can so we can walk through the walls right now which is really good for us um and then some of the nice things are there are commands so you can actually create uh measurements so i can create a measurement from like say here to the floor it might be hard to see but it's in centimeters because i didn't bother changing it to uh imperial but then also if there's things that can be moved you can move objects uh if you've created objects that can be moved so you can make it like a horror scene where all the furniture is floating and the tv pops off the wall but i can set all these things to be movable so i think i'm yeah i made all that um but something that's really nice about this is that um there's even a way that you can click on an object and it'll give you the info like the actual bim information that comes out of the model and i'll show you where that's stored i don't have that set up but it's it's pretty simple to set up in the in the hud and then of course um you can do like a uh you know model on the table setup where you can spin it around and then of course the the one that we're all looking forward to let me see if i can get back inside here real quick we'll see if this works everybody cross their fingers here yeah right i'm going to hit play all right now i should be able to what i didn't plug the uh the headset in so i'm doing a wireless headset by the way so um actually so while while that uh while that starts up it's going to take a second to start up but um are there any questions yet jeff well that starts out so uh joe buck did ask um um or if what what uh what headset you're using and i think you answered that with the using so using the htc vive or using the pro the new one what would uh what i am not using the pro i bought mine before pro was a theme like that uh but i did buy the wireless kit that goes with it and it is a complete game changer it it makes it um it makes all the difference in the world i'm going to restart do you notice a a lag at all on the on the with the wireless kit or i don't there's actually no noticeable difference between wireless and wired when you have a good graphics card and good setup and i had this running on a gtx 780 so right i've got a 2080 now but i had a gtx 780 and it was it was running fine uh you do need a beefy processor to keep up with it and a good motherboard with some fast pci slots uh but it it's um negligible to say the least okay we're going to try this again real quick let's see let's give it away i'm going to hit vr we're going to we're going to see steamvr pop up here hopefully in just a second and so that's the uh the original vibe then this is all right so this is what i was talking about with it possibly let's give it one more shot here everybody clap your hands tell vive here we go steam come on steam you want to work we'll see if it uh we'll wait for it to pop up here make sure it can find the headset i am curious uh jeff maybe we can pull the audience and see who has worked in vr before yeah sure we so uh we do have one question while we're doing it too so yeah i mean i guess yeah who who here has used used goggles and uses them um it'd be interesting to see how many how many folks out there are are sort of prospecting the idea or actually experience and trying to find out more so feel free to in the chat to let us know that um uh somebody's asking uh joe i think he's still asking or is it pedro both pedro and joe are asking if unreal allows you to export um a standalone version of your scene like a lot of the other um like the the endscapes and the twin motions and stuff do uh so repeat that last question um does unreal uh give you the ability to export a standalone uh scene so if you want to export an exe and send it to a client or something like that yes absolutely and vr packages are usually 500 megabytes at minimum not bad and i think when twin motion started they had an issue where when you exported uh the twin motion vr scene it was exporting the entire engine so it was like an 800 megabyte 800 you mean you mean you mean 16 gigs oh was it really yeah so i guess some of the yeah yeah the size of the scene yeah depending on the scene but it does it does export out i think it still exports out the whole unreal engine with it so they're gigantic yeah wow although they're working on some other ways to do that but i forgot how much i'm allowed all right here we go all right so i'm going to turn on the uh vr view so you can see it actually starts up in uh steam home all the games that i play and the friends that i play with i'm going to hit play here we're going to see if this works one more time i'm going to go into vr mode and it doesn't look like it wants to hook onto it so we might have to skip the vr that's all right be our part for now maybe we can get it working in the demo later on so we'll uh we'll set that aside for now oh you know what i can do i can actually uh i can do we can do a vr preview and you can at least see um see me sitting inside you know what i might be in them so it looks like it looks like quite a few folks have um it looks like we have a half and half for folks who are saying they have used it before and have not used it before which is pretty cool oh yeah let's see some people use a rift um change uh acad gatsby just said change the play button to vr play i don't know what that means yeah maybe he's not yeah or a girl sorry yeah and also so that wasn't set up because of something else that wasn't set up it wasn't let me do it it still isn't so uh we might have to we might have to come back to that we'll come back to the demo so so then um you know just just from what you showed us there um you know that the way that you you moved things around um and some of the things so so i guess before we go through the process then let's talk a little bit about um with unreal um to me and correct me for wrong or give me sort of maybe maybe your your thoughts on this um i see the biggest benefits uh other than the fact that you're you're you're you're given um uh the entire unreal engine to work with uh because i know twin motion and and any other programs um they're only allowing you to use whatever they allow you to use as far as the engines the power of the engine so ray tracing some of these graphic things right but to me i guess the the biggest thing is the flexibility right um it seems like it seems like you can pretty much customize and create and do pretty much anything you want beyond sort of your knowledge of the program is that is that sort of what am i right in assuming that uh absolutely and you know if you're if you're programming minded and you kind of that's kind of where i came from is when when you have a package program like enscape twin motion lumion v-ray for for rendering things like that you're limited to what the developers of that program have said this is what we think you're going to really need for creating things unreal as an engine is essentially hey here's a sandbox here's all the tools that we know how to provide with you you go nuts and i mean you've seen the movies and the games and uh that have been produced in unreal i mean you can do that with arcviz you know with aec it's just a matter of what you're capable of doing um you know and and willing to spend time doing to figure that out so hey look we've got um we got to work in there we go i just needed to talk long enough so i don't that i don't have controllers because the way the vr preview works uh but you can see i can look around and then you have access to whatever you've set up as far as actions and and and and like you were moving the chairs around if you had controllers you would have the same access that you gave yourself in the other environment exactly yeah 100 so and if it looks like it's short it's because i'm sitting if i were actually standing up it would be that's a good awesome so so so before we jump into the how you got there now right so i mean it's great to see you know there's my model i sent you a few days ago or maybe even the weekend i remember when i sent it to you but there it is in unreal um uh which is pretty cool but um i guess again sort of talking about the pros and cons so the pros are that uh you have this unlimited flexibility sandbox right um so what because of that or or in general what would you say are the cons of using this process what are the uh it's the exact same thing it's literally so it's like going into a design prompt and the client says we don't have a budget we don't have a site and we don't know what our style is and you're like oh okay i guess i can give you something and then you spend all this time like narrowing it down because i say well that's not exactly what we want but they don't tell you what you want so you you jump into the sandbox and you've got all these tools like you have three different ways that you can make a vr uh you know you can make a vr uh you know scene in unreal and you have to choose okay what's going to be the best one so i actually spent a lot of time trying to figure out do i want to start from scratch and build my own vr ponds or do i want to start with a collab viewer so that you can see the functionality of that because i think that's really cool so by the way this collab viewer you can actually host a session where other people can remote in and you can actually see things and this is free and you know with unreal that you can just set up your own i wish we could demo that but um that's all right one day we'll set it up ahead of time we'll try and get that to work i'll put i'll pull up my my five and we'll try and jump into the same model so no but that's a great point and that's i would say the con is pretty much that yeah it can be very overwhelming it's a double-edged sword right yeah exactly and that's what i've found on on my own too and that's why i wanted to point that out because i think you know what i what i've done over the last year on the show is sort of showed a lot of these options and i think this is just another one but but talking about the pros and cons of each and to me that is you know the the big pro of unreal is what you just said it's it's almost unlimited flexibility uh uh and and and customization of of a virtual scene whether you're using it for videos renderings or or vr um but on the same token you you now you're you're starting with this blank slate and and it's like where do you go next like when you jump into a twin motion or lumion it's like the steps are pretty easy load the model apply materials throw in a bunch of trees and stuff and then you know move on from there right you know because the library's there here it's kind of like you said you can do whatever you want and so i mean i would assume and this is kind of my question to you is um the ability to set up templates and and and whatnot i'm assuming exists right so you're not necessarily starting with a blank slate every time you're an unreal a library template maybe a material template actions whatever it is i'm assuming yeah is plausible right and i'll show you a little bit uh how that works it's actually not templates so much as you just have the project the project is the template right so i have a material palettes project that i load every time i start a new project and i load all the assets into that new project if i want the materials from it um so and we'll go through a little bit of that you'll see how easy it is to load assets you can save a project so the the project that we're going to be starting with is one that i um you know i started this project uh that has some assets loaded into it already so it's essentially a template right i can use this to create uh other vr projects in the future preferably one that that works consistently but um yeah so let's let's run through the process and by the way i just saw i'm reading some of the comments and um um a couple folks talking about what you know what it is that they've used with vr we have some google cardboard folks which is pretty cool um and uh and somebody did ask about the collaboration which is pretty cool um you know the fact that it exists and i know a lot of platforms are trying to figure this out an easy good way to do this because maybe because of the pandemic as well and the fact that you know you can be in vr but be in the same place type of thing so i do know a lot of programs are trying to get that to work so it's pretty cool that it exists and then i also see joe bucheck just mentioned that he asked me if i realized that i'm overlapping with the president's first public address and i did not realize that so i apologize to president biden but i did not plan my live stream based on his public address um so i'm sure you can check recorded yeah they're both recorded so uh stay here and then you can watch joe later i mean president biden so come on you know what this is also overlapping with my youngest son's first soccer practice oh man there you go all right well let's let's get it let's get into uh let's get into the revit side of things then so let's talk about the process and maybe run through and show folks uh an overview of how to get uh my lovely house here in new town connecticut uh into unreal nice yeah let's do it so uh if you've been watching bim after dark this is something this is a model that you've probably seen it's got information in it um it's it's got a building in it and it's got a model in it so i you know i think that qualifies as a bim uh package here um and what we're looking at here is uh the model that jeff graciously sent me thank you very much i figured it would be great to see this since it's a project that uh your viewers would be familiar with and it'd be good to see it go in i'm assuming they're i'm assuming they're they're probably at this point sick of it so i should probably start using another model but it is literally like consuming my life because it's happening outside right now the construction of it you can use that okay um so real quick let's talk about a couple things that you need for this process to really work um you need uh you need a revit model right or you need an fbx model um for unreal you cannot use dae files or colada files like you can in lumion in unreal it's it's fbx there are some other uh formats that it brings in but since that we're talking autodesk fbx is probably kind of the way to go um you need revit of course uh or if you're using another package you can use that i think there are exporters for like 3d studio sketchup but we're not going to worry about those because this is um the revit kids show um you need a data smith exporter data smith is the we'll say package of exporters and importers that allows you to bring in for the purposes of revit all the bim information that's in your model uh so you can see up here i have data smith it does export 3d views you can synchronize you can do a direct link with unreal so that as you're changing things in revit it will update and unreal i think that's an experimental feature i don't know that they haven't really worked out yet i think 4.27 unreal engine 4.27 is going to have uh that upgraded a bit um and then i don't deal with connections so i'm not even gonna deal with it what any of these are uh so uh you also obviously if you're doing vr you need a vr headset of any sort uh unreal engine works with anything that works on openvr so oculus you can use google cardboard you can use uh vive anything that that will work on openvr or steamvr or oculus that unreal has plug-ins for all those you can order that and of course you need a min spec machine something that will run the minimum spec for all of those software and hardware something from i don't know maybe bim box um can probably get you go i bet i bet they even have a check box for i want to do vr with revit and they want to set you up with that i'm sure um somebody asked real quick before we move on actually is is data smith free so the data smith plug-in where do you get it is it free okay that kind of stuff yeah so this is a really good question back in 2017 they introduced data smith to beta users um and they said we're going to let this be free for a year and a year went by and they said you know what i think we're going to keep developing it and they've been developing it ever since so yes it is free i don't know for now free for now um i think that there is a paid package so the thing with unreal is it's free until you produce something like a hundred thousand dollars worth of product with a year and then you have to pay something too epic i don't know what the price structure is uh because i'm a solo studio i don't make a hundred thousand a year product um so uh the data smith exporters and all that is free and i think you can continue using it even after it's not free but there's some stipulations on how that works um in terms of uh because i mean once you have the code for it it's you're just ex you're just executing the code so i don't know i don't know if they'll put it behind a subscription wall or something like that right awesome well thanks for the question that was from barnata franco thank you barnard great yeah thanks for the question uh so it's really simple you hit export 3d view and you set this up to where you're going to go so i'm going to go to revit to unreal which is where i do it and then you set it it saves it out as a udata smith uh file i'm gonna hit cancel but you do that it exports it um there there aren't really any options it just spits it out that's it um so it's not a dot fbx it's creating it's a dot u data smith file correct and i'm actually gonna i'm gonna i'm gonna correct myself here right let's let's just see what happens i'm just gonna do let's do that one uh yeah yeah it just spits it out there's no options so it'll give you a message that says export successful all right and that's really all you do in revit i'm going to there's some particulars with this that i'm going to talk about once we get into the unreals because it's it'll be clear to see uh once you get in there uh so i i mean there are any questions about the revit side of things it's i mean that's pretty simple that's i mean yeah no i have to model things in revit yeah right model things in revit and spit them out i'm assuming um similar rules apply as far as applying materials and being able to access them or or is are the objects coming in um object-based so you don't really care about what materials are applied well we'll we'll get to that in a second how does that does that work that's fine with me okay that's all right i'll wait i'll wait i'll wait um so i will say though material wise if you can use if you've started using pbr materials in revit you're going to be better off um oh so actually so if you're using pb so so if you're using pbr materials um is it it's bringing the textures and all of that through then it's not even actually your name it's bringing it off yeah it actually does it even if you don't use pbr materials um but the it does work better if you do use pbr because it has all those channels and those are the channels and stuff that so for those of you who don't know what pbr materials are they're physically based rendered materials and i'll post a link in the description of this video after we're done live to a tutorial i gave actually i did on showing you how to create pbr materials and revit so good little good little area for me to plug but i did create a tutorial i think last year or something on it so because i do know that that's a fairly new feature and not a lot of people really know about it but it kind of snuck in it kind of snuck in there and didn't really get all the fanfare that i think it deserved honestly well for for good reasons but at least they're moving in that direction yes right right right okay fair enough um so i already have a project that we're going to work with but i want to show you how we got there so and you you launch uh unreal from the epic launcher just like you would your games um it's under unreal engine uh same place you find twin motion um there's a ton of stuff here for learning the engine and whatnot uh but if you just go here and you hit launch you get this right here where you're creating a new project and what we're going to start with is under architectural engineering and construction i mean this is how invested epic is into us as an industry right we have our own starting template category uh but if you hit next here you can start with blink if you're like master pro ready to build everything from scratch it works great um you can do arcviz uh if you have microsoft hololens there's one specifically for that but we're gonna we're starting from the collab viewer i'm not actually gonna hit next because that actually creates the project uh but this is essentially what you get when you do this um so so this is kind of a template then right i mean it it's it's it's a template is it more of a workspace but this or does this actually have assets and some things in there this is the actual project so you can see i actually have assets already in here uh there's uh you know blueprints are already in here um yeah everything that you need to run this out of the box is in this this is actually like a visual studio project bundled into an unreal engine package so you can you if you have visual studio installed you can actually open this solution in visual studio and do it by code instead of by blueprint and views in uh unreal engine uh so yeah it's it's not a workspace it is you're actually opening the project just like you would open i guess a model in revit uh you know i guess is that is that kind of where you're going with that yeah yeah exactly it was i'm just i'm trying yeah i'm trying to think about like you know because you know you think workspace is maybe it was just giving me the tools but it looks like it's giving me assets and not just like the windows i want or the tool kits i want you know what i mean it looks like it's actually building a little bit of a of a template for us to use which is great yeah and and i will say on that note it is kind of a workspace because you are it does actually create physical files so this you know this actually corresponds to this folder structure here okay um so it is a workspace that kind of brings all those assets into one place but you're also only working within the realm of that project awesome uh so if i open another project it's that engine and interface for that specific project so this is what we're going to start with um and i'm not going to go through how to use unreal engine that would be that would be beyond the scope of this we need a few more live streams for that right well hey you know i guess uh maybe a month or so from now we'll start that one um but i'm going to go to here and i'm basically just going to duplicate this collaborative viewer we're going to call it uh revit kid house all right and we're going to open that up all right we can see it's basically the same thing now it gets a little tricky because there's some levels here and it says that it's a sample level if i actually delete stuff in here it's going to delete it in the other one because it's kind of like i've x-ref or linked um boy xraft here i'm going to be shown here x-raying and you're talking about unreal whoa whoa yeah i know um maybe it's for those people who are watching who are like on the line they're not sure if they want to use revit or not uh so i'm actually going to get rid of this level here we're just going to remove selected yes we're going to do that all right and we'll see that it is blank which is perfect this is exactly where we're going to start from uh so what i'm going to do now is i'm going to tell unreal engine how to bring that data smith object in and i'm going to do that through what's called a data prep asset uh so actually first of all you know what i'm going to do is i'm just going to show you what it looks like to just bring it in so there is a just import data smith so we're going to do that revit to unreal there it is you tell it where you want it i'm going to tell it that i want it in let's put it let's just put it in data smith for now this one right here i know that's the wrong one so i don't want to do it there if you do just the straight data smith import it gives you some options you can uncheck like lights and cameras animations things like that uh you can tell it certain options with your static meshes so you can set up light map resolution if you're a pure revit user this is probably like uh complete gibberish to you but this is actually fairly important for our if you're an arc viz person you're like yeah uh that's important you need to set that something higher to 64. but you do you know you can tell it to generate light map uvs and stuff like that because believe it or not revit's geometry is not optimized for architectural vis visualization shocking believe it or not so by light map so you say is it bringing in the ies files or the light the light files no it is actually bringing in um it is bringing in the actual uh it's creating light map uvs got it i see the same okay let's see here i think i turned lights off yeah so i can't actually find it so there i mean there it is so what's really interesting about this is i can select all these objects and i can move them individually right i can also i have to find the uh let's see here you know there's a base point for the whole thing so i can move that up and down and move it around and this is great and all i mean everything comes in i can come down here and i can look at the asset data which you can see it has data smith information so and buried in all of this you can see that i've got categories i've got you know whatever i selected as a generic model it gives me all the information for it so um let's find something that i that jeff put a lot of information in here let's see [Music] there we go so we know that this area is 118 square feet i think this is a part so element category is probably nope walls there we go uh there might be yeah there's some square footage some takeoff information yeah maybe costing that one too i think yeah their unit price 9.89 per square foot i think so it ended up being more than 989 everyone i mean it brings all the information in and you can you can pull all of this information for you know anything in the project um but this is great and all but i'm going to actually show you so you can see now these are the revit materials right and well this is unreal we have access to really nice materials so why would we why would we do this and i did not put pbr materials on this file by the way and that's fine we're revit users we don't we only worry about what it looks like in the construction documents right yes yes i used all of i used twin motion and enscape and all those other ones for it so i never needed to or i should say twin motion uh so i'm actually just gonna delete the uh that model from our project here which by the way this is not a great sale having to watch me go through the world outline or to find everything but once you get used to it it's i would i won't say it's great but you do eventually get used to it and you're you you understand how to get around inside of it uh so what i'm actually going to do is we're going to come in here and we're going to use this data prep asset now what's really cool about this is unreal engine gives you a way to essentially uh i got to move the talking button here to batch all of your stuff so if you're doing material swaps or you want to create light maps at a certain resolution you can do all that through the data prep asset and this is something that's still under development there's certain things that you can and can't do so we're going to go through this we're going to spend a little time in this i'm telling it which data smith file i want to bring in so it knows that it's pointing there if you have a folder of data smith files you can you can see that you can create a data smith folder import as well so i'm going to tell it to import and what we have essentially here is like a small little screen for us to preview everything and you can select on objects and get that same data smith metadata that that you saw earlier so you can see that i've got this little um preview here and you might notice that the the site didn't come in that's because for this one i had actually hid the the topo in revit so in revit anything that's visible in this is going to come in so i think i actually just you know hid category uh applied that and then i did my export from here so uh keep that in mind uh let's see here where were we this one there we go all right so there's a couple things that you kind of you kind of need to do one of them is you need to set uh let's see here you need to set the static lighting up and it comes in as a default of 0.2 that sets a reasonable resolution for your light maps and i'll show you what that means here in just a little bit it's kind of hard to describe without without going into what a what a light map in a uv is and the other thing we're going to do is we're going to do a material swap by table so if you do a material swap essentially what you can do is if you select an object you can see what materials and it's great out there working on that but you can see this one has gypsum wall board siding vertical you know it has all the materials of all the assembly layers in revit right here and you can say hey i want to find all the gypsum and i want to replace it with actually something that's going to be more visible let's say clapboard all right and let's just say i wonder if i have uh let's see sure we'll just say sighting wood siding so i i know already that the material for clapboard is this guy right here right uh so if i hit execute and we sit and wait uh what you're going to see is that it's going to find hopefully this material and it's going to update it which it didn't it might have a different name sorry oh there's clapboard oh you know what i've been asked but asterisk asterisk let's see if that works if it gets loud my my kids just got home so i'm all good so so so this environment right now um you're basically there we go awesome so so you're basically um you're you're you're mapping and doing all this work to the import before it even imports right so you're you're setting up data connections between materials and this thing maybe maybe categories and something else right so you're you're able to take that information from your model and use it to link to unreal things but you're doing it in this environment so now it's kind of like the way it's going to be when you bring it in so i guess my question is i think this was someone's question before maybe this is a good time to ask it is um if if you modify your model and you're not using one of these live syncs um is it just a matter of overriding that data smith file and this whole thing stays intact is that is that the the process or yeah so what's really cool about this data prep asset that we're creating is anytime we want to refresh the model we just run this again and what it does is it does this whole process of importing executing this this graph this recipe that we're doing and then committing it to the scene so this process that we're going through you just do it again if you refresh something and it does the whole thing uh over again um and that's what's nice about this data print this like i would not bring data smith in without this because if you refresh it without this you're going to lose all the materials that you changed because it's just bringing the data smith information in and when you were to use like an fbx file if usually like an fbx file that's what would happen right you would have it would just be an import without the these these links that you're creating in theory so then then you're losing that is that it's an inconsistent yes sometimes you can refresh an fbx and then materials substitutions will change sometimes it will not and awesome um it's just like in twin motion how you can you can merge things by material emerge things like family sometimes if you forget or if the fbx is written out a certain way it you know i you know i've had materials in twin motion disappear on me because it is very inconsistent as well i will tell you that that is consistent between unreal and twin motion is that that part is very inconsistent yeah so awesome okay cool so that's what the data smith recipe is for is making it consistent every time you bring it in so there you know there's a ton of materials in here i don't want to go through and have to you know do every single one of these you know i don't want a recipe for every single one so what i'm going to do instead is there's a really cool option called substitute material by table uh and it just so happens that i already have a table for this uh and we're gonna open that and take a look all right so i've already gone through and told unreal what to look for and i've already picked materials for it uh so one of the things that i think yeah you know we might have a problem with is i haven't brought assets in from another one so it's not going to be able to find some of these materials so well we're gonna have to do that real quick man we're gonna have to find out how easy it is to bring assets in but i want to take a look at this real quick because essentially what i've done is i've told unreal engine and each of these rows is handling a material in this asset right so i'm saying hey go look for glass anywhere in the model in materials and then replace it with my material called realistic glazing all right so it's going to go look for objects so i selected this door it's going to go look for every object and it's going to say and every element in this doesn't have a material glass if it does it's going to replace it with that so before we hit execute here i want to bring in some material um some materials from another project which i just so happen to have up so this is a another free project in unreal i'm going to show real quick where you can find that under learn in the epic launcher it's under legacy samples down at the bottom um and it's called realistic rendering you essentially you go you download this you create a project and you have access to all of these material assets and physical assets that are really really nice and you have access to the you know the lighting setup and stuff like that this is a really incredible architectural visualization project to base your your projects off of but what i'm really interested in here is basically all the materials in this scene uh so what i mean you know how what would you do to transfer materials in revit right you would go to project transfer project standards select the materials and then you'd have to have both of them open and all that stuff so what's really nice about this is i don't have to have the other project open it just so happens that i do so what i'm going to do is i'm going to find the map that this is so this is the room map okay these are maps right here and i'm going to right click this i'm going to do asset actions and migrate so i'm migrating this from one project to another uh i will note that i do have this model is open in 4.25 the new model is 4.26 just like revit you don't want to go backwards you can it will let you but then when you get into the project if you go backwards you're going to get error messages that says hey guess what you've done all this work but i'm not going to let you save it because all these assets were made in a newer newer version which is not fun uh so then all i'm going to do is i'm going to go find the uh the folder for our project here which is here by the way the reason this is in a a root folder on my hard drive is because there is a very limited uh character length limitation in uh unreal so the content folder is kind of your main asset folder so i'm going to go find that and i'm going to hit select folder uh i've got some stuff already there so i'm going to hit yes to all for everything and essentially what this does is it takes all the assets that are dependent or yeah that this scene is dependent on and it's basically packaging them up and moving them over and the reason you can't do that manually is because everything is set up as what they call a us so the textures are not actually images it's a you asset it's something that's been compiled by the engine so now if i go back to our project i can actually go and see that i have in this project now that room folder that i can open this map in our project now and all those materials be there but what i'm actually interested in is now that i have that my materials should i'm going to save this i'm going to reopen it and see hopefully all these are are in there so oak flooring oh yeah here's the ones that didn't come in so oak flooring i know that this is wood floor material instance yep that one right there and then gypsum is uh by the way the searching and unreal engine is incredible it looks like yeah i mean it's it's pretty much like a right-click search in dynamo right it looks like you're just you're just clicking and searching and it's diving around that's awesome and and what's really nice is everything's color-coded so if i hit this bar here it knows that it's looking for things that are of the same color that will plug into this node so it's not looking through all the content it's only looking through things that will go into this material which is really nice so this is whoa paint [Music] interior let's see here i think it's just that one right there all right so i think we're good here so i'm gonna hit save on this and we're gonna go back to our data prep asset and i'm gonna hit execute and now we're gonna wait so essentially what's happening is it's executing this recipe right now so other than so you showed materials um you showed the the the the static lighting or the the light maps um so what other kind of things can you do in in this this this data prep thing are you like a question jeff just just some examples uh maybe give give users some or viewers some examples of what else you can do in here because i'm intrigued by this thing for sure yes so very specifically i'm going to show you real quick so if you're going to do a walk-through what do you i mean think about if you're going to walk through a building what do you want to have a floor right you want to walk on a floor of course of course so um if you remember from the demo there was a fly option but then there was a walk option well in a real you have to have unreal has to have something for you to actually walk on so if i look at player collisions you can see the only thing to collide with right now is this this purple base which is actually in the preview so what i actually want to do is create some collisions here for us to walk on well how do i do that aside from going through i can create collisions manually by going through and doing this but i don't want to do that manually because there's tons of floors in here so what i want to do is i'm going to use um the recipe here to look for metadata which is the data smith stuff and what i can do is just to check i have this floor selected right here we're going to come down here and you're going gonna have to squint to see it i promise it's there uh but we can see main uh element category is the key that we're looking for all right so the key is element category okay and the value we're looking for is floors okay of course all right so this is a search this is like filters in reddit yep right so this is basically creating a bucket to put everything that fits this filter criteria into and it's going to pass that down to the next thing well what's the next thing i want to do i want to create a collision so i'm going to search for collision all right i can create a simple collision or a convex collision i'm going to pick convex for now there's a very specific reason that i don't want to get into but it's basically the reason is it works so let's say you want to do that with walls well you can do that with category walls let's say you want to plug in information you want to set metadata information for roofs or something like that you can do that so you remember earlier we were talking about things that don't work very well in revit um or not from revit to unreal one of them is parts and jeff i'm sorry you've got a lot of parts and you did it the right thing i do have you parted it out and you demoed those assembly pieces yeah that's perfect i don't know if it was the right way but it worked i mean i it's always if it worked for you then it's the right way that's that's the way revit works right yeah right if it works for you then you've done it correctly right um but parts unfortunately just they don't work with collisions uh yet it's something that i know that they're working with um so keep that in mind so i actually exported uh what except i don't see that piece there so i don't know i don't know uh we'll see how that works so i'm going to hit execute now actually we're going to go to that player collision because that's what we were doing right we're trying to create floors that collide so i'm going to hit execute and it's doing the same thing it's basically this is the preview right i'm executing the recipe we're setting up the static lighting we're setting up the materials by the table and then we're setting collisions so you can see now i've got collisions that i can do oh and actually you see we're missing one right here uh if you're familiar with your house which is uh a part right there's a park there's a floor right there so what i actually need to do is i need to copy these so we're going to copy this here actually i can just duplicate that and just trust me on this folks it's called the element original category i will tell everyone um from experience that um in general not just with unreal but in general downstream uses of parts is is not a great thing like it's a lot of programs downstream uses um parts blow up and do different things you know it's an art form we'll see it's an art form yes so it's unfortunate because they were created i think in mind with with like contractors in mind right being able to slice and dice objects and be able to export you know a floor without actually slicing in the architectural side of it but meanwhile um you know the downstream uses of that slice and diced object can be crazy complicated or just simply not work so we can see that this is a part um i want to isolate this this is a part in the brevit model you see how thin this is jeff you did great that's a really thin part that's all i need to collide with right well this is the problem you have unreal i mean you can see how thick that piece is right there okay so there's some things that i'm gonna have to fix and and we'll fix it here in just a little bit um so there we go we have some collisions we've got some material changes the the options are limitless here and what you can do um so but i'm gonna go ahead and commit this so we have a model uh in our map that we have and it this is gonna take a second so it'll disappear from here it'll freak you out the first time you do it you'll be thinking what did i do wrong well all it did is it spit everything out of the data prep asset and into the map that you're actually using so there we go that's how we know it's done so there we go there's our there's our uh our deal here we can do the same thing we can look and see uh player collisions there we go we got that what i am going to do is just to show you this guy right here so i need this to be thinner otherwise it's going to be it's really going to be jacked up so what you can do is you can come in here and open the mesh so this is the mesh for just that floor and we're going to say well okay let's set complex collisions and we want to tell it that so there's an individual mesh editor for any object that comes in yes and you can actually edit the meshes in here so i'm going to save this i told it basically i want to use that complex collision as the collision in our project so now when i come back to unreal engine and i do player collision oh maybe oh i got something else in there the bottom part of the floor yeah probably yeah there we go so i just i just deleted that that bottom part there so there we go so there's that we have player collisions all right now i'm using unlit mode here um i'm gonna move on to adding the rest of the stuff in yeah let's do it any questions there was a couple questions um first was uh is the furniture brought in from revit currently in the scene and i believe it was the rabbit furniture right i think there it is yeah so that's all rivet furniture so i i do want to talk someone asked about materials earlier i do want to talk about materials real quick because um the way that revit or unreal engine does this is really it's really fascinating actually so it creates what is called a revit master material and then creates instances of that material to make the material so you can see red unreal engine had no idea how to handle this material so it made a sofa material which is what it's called in revit but if i open this so you can see it probably looks nothing like what it did and you'll see that it's single sided all the materials in unreal are single sided you can change that but you can see there's a ton excuse me of options over here and you can see that the parent material is revit master get ready for for you for you people who are not pbr or node material shader people just just sit back and enjoy the show this is a material structure in unreal engine this is a really complex one so it has different so you can see that the basic attributes here are you know base color metallic specular roughness all these things that revit wants us to start using but you haven't had to use until recently and there's some other stuff by the way it uses normal maps not bump maps i think revit still uses bump maps even with the pbrs i could be wrong somebody in the comments is going to correct me on that um but i i know before pbr it used black and white bump maps not normal maps these are different um uh bump only goes in one direction normal goes in in and out for for your color uh for the way the image works but i'm not going to get into this obviously we cannot cover this in and what little time we have left if we have time left i don't know we're we're running we're hitting the clock but everyone's into it so let's um oh okay let's uh let's at least at least get through uh the content you wanted to as far as the materials and letting everyone know uh the point yeah the point here is that there is a material made for every material that comes out of revit and you can you can edit every single one of them uh clearly this is why i showed you swapping materials out being beneficial because you don't you don't want to have to deal with this so if so if you swap it out to a a unreal material you're you're you're you're using only the unreal material now and then you're ignoring it's not doing that complex crazy map that unreal tries to do to figure out what the hell rabbit's doing exactly so what i can actually what i can actually do is there's a there's a nice fabric a curtain material uh so let's see if i look for a curtain there's a curtain material that's nice so we can drop that on there and boom there's there's the new material on that static mesh um another thing that's nice is i can actually go find uh there were some nice couches in the the room so there's a nice couch static mesh okay which is the mesh geometry so i can actually say by the way this is just an actor that holds all these assets right so all i have to do is drag this over here and i've got a new you know new mesh on top of that and you can see it brought in its own textures as well awesome so that's just a that's a replace that's a replaced object basically that's what that's doing so exactly awesome speaking of that room rendering i'm just going to use all the lighting from this is that okay with you jeff yeah i'm just i mean i'm just gonna i'm just gonna use all the lighting from this so essentially what i'm gonna do here is i'm gonna bring in the these are uh processing boxes okay that basically tells unreal engine you can see there's a jj abrams special uh lens flare bloom oh yeah going on so i'm gonna bring that in and i'm also gonna bring in what's called atmospheric fog which kind of gives it gives the space a little bit of atmospheric volume i'm also going to find a direct light i believe is one of the things that is in here direct light and i'm basically going to copy this and paste it into my new project and the only reason that this is going to work is because i've already migrated everything into this project so i'm actually copy pasting from different projects because the assets exist from that migration exactly so i'm going to go to lip mode so you can see what the difference is and you can ignore all these preview stickers that are everywhere we'll get to that in a second so i'm just going to control v all right you can see i've got jj abrams showing up already there we go i'm going to make sure that my box the house is inside the box because that tells unreal engine this is uh the area so you can see when i go outside the box the the lighting changes a little bit so it's essentially giving the camera different properties when i'm inside that box uh and then the next thing i'm going to do is i'm going to go and grab let's see here i have another map that uh let's be sure we save all that that has my my mountain scene so we're gonna grab that real quick so someone had a great question actually um yeah jacob asked uh can you replace the revit families with actors like you just did through the data prep process yes yes yes you can i had a feeling that was a yes but i wanted you to answer it because that's really cool right so you can set up you can set up essentially replacement objects for your scenes on the load which is pretty neat right if you have a couch that's really nice and unreal you can just put a placeholder even a box that looks like crap and revit but it's there and it looks good in plans for example but then it flips out to this beautiful unreal you know uh object or mesh which is which is pretty neat and and even more importantly let's say that you have a asset and unreal engine that's specifically made for like an opening door that has the pivot and the revolve and everything set up right you can swap those objects out for the doors in revit and then you can actually have that set up to be revolving doors so you click in a button and the door opens so you can walk through it you know things like that light switch assets that have a blueprints already set up for um you know turning lights on and off you can set that up as well uh so that's what that recipe is for and it's got i'll tell you what that data prep asset has gone through many many evolutions and it's probably still being um revised so uh it's in fact it's to the point where um like i had a bunch of stuff already set up and i had to rebuild it because it's evolved to a certain point yeah uh so we're going to use this mountain scene it might look a little bit familiar to you and i'm going to do the same thing i'm going to grab the atmospheric the skylight and i think um oh actually you know what i don't even have to do that i don't even have to do that why'd you guys let me do that i didn't have to do that because this is all extremely foreign to me yes so this is this is the map that i'm going to bring in but instead of copying and pasting what i'm actually going to do is i'm just going to bring it in as a level so i've got these levels over here uh and this is like um linking a project in right so i'm going to hit add existing there's my landscape app i'm going to hit open all right and then i get the i get to zoom way out it looks like i brought in the uh the city skyscraper city backdrop from the other project so you can see yeah so now my mountains are on top of everything right so how do i get that up there well i get to go back up here to our data stiff asset right and i'm going to i'm actually going to turn our mountains off and i'm just going to select everything that's right here and then turn that back on i'm gonna try that again i'm gonna select this stuff and then i need to bring just the actor if you're moving data smith stuff you only want to bring the asset scene actor otherwise you're going to be moving things in weird and weird ways and it it breaks everything so we're going to bring this up to on top of our mountain we're just going to find a spot that looks kind of cozy and we're going to rotate it so you've got a nice view of the lake oh beautiful right there's the lake right there that would be a nice view i definitely don't have that i hope you have a good civil engineer that's on uh we're gonna come back inside here real quick and everything's really bright um you know we can fix that though because one thing we haven't done yet is baked our lighting so i'm going to tell it to bake the lighting in while it's baking we're going to have time to ask or answer some questions that might be coming up while that's doing that so i'm actually going to build the navigation and the lighting at the same time so here it's adding it and then we're going to hit build and one thing i do like about unreal engine is that it has a watch the paint dry feature uh so it uses something called swarm agent to well i thought i was gonna build oh you know what i gotta change this setting real quick world settings lightness boom now let's try it there it is all right so i'm going to leave this up on the screen while it's going but this is essentially the watching the paint dry feature in the unreal engine awesome all right so while that's going i think i think um i think this actually there's a couple questions i think one of them may be answered by what you're building right now but um the first one i think was joe i missed it up top but um i guess i'm going to ask a little different than he did but he asked are there any manufacturers providing textures and and products so i guess my i think the the more global question to that is um you know asset libraries um you know what where do you what do you have to choose from as far as unreal is concerned hey so i'm really glad you asked that because i was reminded today that if you have an epic account and i don't i think if you have an epic games account you can you just have access to this but this is the mega scans qixel library um and so i mean boom here's these are all free right that you can just download and put in actually you can put these in twin motion too by the way um materials so there is the surfaces materials am i just missing materials here i'm not sure where the where those materials are but like i know that's like stacked stone by the way if i'm lagging it's because i'm building the light map as you can see yeah you're building light mac yeah so so um other than so quick sol is a great resource and especially for using unreal or a program that runs on unreal but i guess um to to further the the question um i would say so if you find um i don't know maybe a turbo squid model or or other models from other so maybe you have a 3d max model from something or or whatever it may be um i assume you know you would just bring those in whatever that method asked for and they're usable right i mean i would i would imagine if if you had an fbx from turbosquid for example that would probably come in pretty good right yes yeah so if and sketchup models too so if you i mean if you if you can find an fbx converter or bring it into revit and export it out through datasmith you know you could do it that way as well um as long as you can get a physical model and get it converted to fbx uh you're good awesome it looks like pierre felix is on is on the chat guys uh he actually works at epic uh i know pierre and uh and he he's been working on the revit to unreal and also the twin motion the twin motion to unreal workflow too so i'm sure he'll be able to jump in on some of the questions that maybe i i've been ignoring because i don't necessarily want to answer so thanks for jumping in pierre well while pierre since pierre's on i i have to give a massive shout out to antoine who also works at epic who has let me interrupt him during his game play sessions at night to try to figure out uh not only now but when i was originally learning um figuring this stuff out if you're on discord there's an unreal slackers discord channel where epic employees are pretty heavily involved and they will help you get through things um and the community is amazing the assets that are available are amazing uh and it's really why i've stuck with epic versus going back to unity for um for my engine needs so so uh great point there and pierre thanks for joining us i i will i will say that yes yes thank you they've been epic has been very good with reaching out to the aac industry and and and they are they have been great with support and also asking for our feedback which is phenomenal um so um i think this what you're showing now uh goes back to a question that uh i don't remember had it sorry maybe brad had it uh sorry if i lost it but it was basically how to make it not look gamey right and so the realism side of it and i think what you're showing here and you could talk about it a little more is is baking the scene um and is is going to get you to that point but um all the stuff you just did in general as you can see now look at the scene compared to before this is how you start getting more realism and less gamey i guess yeah 100 and you can see like we were talking about light map uvs and things like that earlier so you can see the resolution of the shadow there's there's multiple factors here uh but one of the things that really makes this is you can see that this light map resolution is like 184 well if i make this 512 it's going to be it's good the shadows are going to be different on this they're going to be you know and it's not immediate i have to rebuild it in order to show it but this is what we were talking about with geometry optimization and revit the people at epic have worked tirelessly to try to make the geometry that comes in from revit work revit is not an arc viz software and the modeling engine does not create geometry that's optimized for it so you can see like you get these these seams on the on the edges of where walls come together like guys if you want to see and this isn't the reflection of bad modeling right because it's good modeling for what we need it for but those walls are definitely in line i can tell you that for sure those are in line exactly if you want to see like how badly your model is optimized for for arcviz just bring it into unreal so maybe real quickly can you can you uh just launch this full screen so everyone can see that that sort of interior scene and just get a sense of it because i think with all the bars and stuff it's uh and in the fact that we're ultra wide and whatnot well let's see just disorder there we go bring it home there we go so other than the the the lens flare in your face that's a heavy duty lens flare i mean you could see yeah the reflections the lighting um you know it it does it looks nice it's it's you could see with enough time and understanding uh tweaking these materials and whatnot you can get some phenomenal results from this i mean guys this is 45 minutes worth of work on a model that you didn't create while we're doing it live i'm willing to bet that you can mop this floor for 45 minutes in real life and not get it that shiny awesome great sweet well we're we're we're hitting the the end here so i think i think we could wrap it up um i i i think in general um maybe clearly people are interested in this there's been tons of comments um and uh when we spent time on the revit to unreal workflow but maybe maybe in the future we'll have you back and just talk a little bit more about the unreal side of it and and the tweaks to get you know from the blank slate we've been talking about to a a photo realistic uh you know real-time environment i think that that could be maybe the the part two of this discussion yeah i don't know how you feel about that carl i mean yeah we could we could do that for sure i'm not really i i don't do a lot of photo realism stuff outside of twin motion so i but i'm happy to explore that i will say the closest you'll get in this environment how about that there are some really great resources at um let's see here learn.unrealengine.com and i think jeff's gonna have the link for that um below and if you're a gamer right that you can do you get little tags and badges for going through their courses but all the stuff that i went through here was basically taking lessons from those courses and um applying them to this so there's there's creating interior arc vis creating vr walkthroughs creating exterior arcfiz all kinds of stuff and not just for arcfiz but also learning the engine in general which is really great as well fantastic awesome well any final words carl before we wrap up i want i want to thank you for joining us this has been awesome people have been been loving it clearly this is something that i think uh the the the revit world was was looking for just some info on and clarity on what first of all what unreal is but also what it would take to get a model into unreal usable so i appreciate that um where where can people find you when they leave here oh boy uh well believe it or not i have i also have a youtube channel it's just called creative things um and i i stream my work uh live so like as i'm working on clients projects um uh and that's that's pretty much it my website is basically my old blog creativethings.com it's and it's not c-r-e-a-t it's c-r-e-8 i got it i will make sure to link i will make sure the link link all of that below in the description and in the blog post tomorrow at the revitkid.com um so uh carl thank you for joining me this has been awesome um uh any any any last words to the kid audience uh twitter twitter's creative things as well you can find me there as well uh thank you so much jeff for having me on what about revit forum yes you can find it it's actually um i think it's still an architect r-k-i-t-e-c i laugh at that because that's sort of the connection we didn't know we had until recently was uh was his username on on revit form i recognized on rfo so pretty cool awesome so everyone uh thank you guys for joining us today i really appreciate it um this has been fun i'll see you guys next week thank you bimbox for sponsoring it thank you carl for joining me um you guys are amazing now you can go watch joe biden's address i'll probably go watch it too with that i want to see uh bid everyone to do have a great weekend uh the weather's supposed to be beautiful at least for the next couple of days up here so enjoy it while you can and stay safe and i'll talk to everyone soon see you later you

Channel: TheRevitKid

Views: 15,609

Keywords: revit, revit design, architecture, architecture design, autodesk revit, revit tutorial, lumion, lumion 3D, lumion architecture, architect, residential architect, revit tip, revit tutorials, revit architecture, BIM, building information modeling, autodesk revit tutorials, architecture tutorials, revit 2022, revit 2021, revit 2020

Id: arC1aUMgZyw

Length: 81min 25sec (4885 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 11 2021