Unreal Engine: Arch Viz Training (Pt. 1)

welcome to the Unreal Engine arc-v' is training series we're going to go over a lot of really cool topics here and we're also going to not go for some things a little background about myself before we do get started my background is in animation motion design and visualization I now work for a healthcare architecture firm doing VR and arc fades full-time so I'm always happy to answer any questions and I'd like to start giving back to the community so here we go so we will cover the basics for visualization in unreal engine we'll start with the basic understanding that you have just opened unreal for the first time we'll just go from scratch as if you're just starting out and I want to really get you guys equipped for doing this professionally or for yourselves it's it's so fulfilling and a lot of fun and I really hope that I can share some of that experience with you we'll talk about physically based rendering or PBR what it means why it's great and why we're using it and unreal and how to best make your materials work with PBR we also talked about lighting and rendering techniques we're going to go over how to bake your lights get rid of a lot of light errors well talk all about light mass and a lot of the details and the the little finer things that go along with the lighting we'll talk about terminology as if you you haven't done anything with 3d before well maybe not that basic but we'll talk about a lot of the things in unreal that maybe aren't defined very well elsewhere and we'll talk about a lot of tips and tricks things that I found in the past that have really been helpful for arc vis we will not be talking about Revit we will be starting with a Revit file so let's assume that you know you're starting an arc fist project and the architect or the design theme just gave you this Revit file told you to make it look pretty so that's where we'll be starting you'll start with a Revit file for free we'll go with a bunch of free asset so you don't have to buy anything to do this we're not going to talk about architecture per se I'm not an architect I'm not going to pretend to be well we'll uh we'll go off what you need to know how about that we're gonna avoid 3d modeling as much as we can there are some times later on in this short series where we where we do need to get into some 3ds max to add some details to some models but we're going to avoid that for the most part I'd be happy to go more into that later and other tutorials if it would be helpful we're not going to talk about substance either designer or painter we're not going to talk about those plugins integration anything like that again maybe that could be better suited for a future tutorial and we're not going to talk about traditional level design so when you're doing arc vids you're really making something as realistic as you can and trying to base your design decisions off of what the user will see with level design you're able to have a little bit more freedom with how you're directing the users eye and their attention and draw more attention to some things and you know kind of fudge what what would actually be physically real we're not going to do that here this is all about arc fizz so here we go all right here we go so we're gonna be using Revit 2018 3ds max 2018 and then Unreal Engine 4 19 and what you also need to have is unreal studio on your Epic Games account so unreal studio gives you access to data Smith which is a really great enterprise program to go from 3ds max Sketch up soon to Unreal Engine so we'll be able to do it very quickly very easily all you have to do is go to unreal engines website go to Enterprise Unreal Studio sign up in here so that your account has access then you need to download this exporter for 3ds max and go through the prompts to install that pretty straightforward then in your epic games launcher go down here to unreal studio beta and they need to install the engine remember we're using 419 so make sure you have that up-to-date as well and we'll come back to that here in a bit so here's our Revit file that we found online this is a advanced ish office building looks sort of empty almost industrial I will not pretend to be an architect nor will I pretend to know Revit so we'll just go ahead and download that free file there that'll be in the description and here's what it looks like you can kind of see what we'll be working with there's some foliage there's a lot of empty offices we have a lot of glass for nature inside skylights looks pretty good a lot of stuff to work with it'll be a good challenge for us so we're not actually going to do anything in Revit we actually need to go into 3ds max and you'll go import and this is important you use linked Revit and then you'll specify that Revit project that you just downloaded it'll ask you about the the skylight system you can hit yes or no it doesn't really matter at this point I'm not sure if there's any difference so in here we can see a nice wireframe view of everything we have all of our objects I've yeah already added some things here so I'll go over that but you can see everything came in 3ds max we have our cameras we have lights in here thousands and thousands of objects now the important thing that we have to do in here is to combine like objects so and your project if you just imported this you'll have every single one of these mullions and they'll all be separate objects so what we'll need to do is I would go up here and I would search I've already done this I'll just walk you through it you type in rectangular mullion and then it'll have just those you select yeah here we go here we go let's do the roof for example now let's do let's do these walls so we have these walls selected because you just search for them here and then you will hide unselected so these were all of your mullions you could drag over all of these and then go to this utilities icon here go down to collapse and then choose collapse selected so we need to do that for groups of mullions and let's unhide everything so that your your going to get to this point so you'll have a different blocks of these mullions and this william be important when we get to light building later on and having a unreasonable light bake time so you can see I've kind of blocked these altogether I'm sure there's much more efficient ways to do this I'm not great with 3ds Max and I did the I didn't do those show you how to do that so we're just going to select all of those unselect these there we go and then we just want to go to collapse collapse selected boom now that's just one object there we go I didn't get the back ones but that's fine okay so once you've done that for all your mullions we actually needs to do that for all the glass panels as well now what we could do there is I don't know hundreds maybe a thousand different glass panels all over this building what we need to do is collapse those so that there one object per plane so you'd have one one window essentially going from here to here it'll have gaps in it for all these Mullings but it'll be one object same for this stairwell here we'll have one object here one object for this whole surface it's all transparent so we don't need to worry about resolution anything like that so this is important down the line but it's it's better to get out of the way early so once you have your windows collapsed you're mullins collapsed all we need to do now that we have that a 3ds Max exporter installed we go let's uh select everything go up here file export and choose whatever folder you would like to work in here and go down and choose unreal data Smith and we'll just uh data Smith test and then here we have everything selected so you can go ahead and choose that it'll take a minute to process I've already gone through this so you can do that and then I will not waste your time so here we go uh here's our Unreal Engine project what you'll do is a you go to your launcher choose launch 4:19 and then let's walk through that yes here we go so you'll go in here choose new project and you'll have this new tab up here you choose unreal studio and we're going to do a blank project product viewer can be used for some nice commercial projects I haven't done anything with this yet but I imagine there's some really great use cases there and then choose whatever you would like for the name and then you'll plop into this project right here empty you can see there's very nice guy in here but not a lot going on so we're not going to worry about anything in here right now all we're going to do is in our browser choose import data Smith there we go and then you'll go and find where you put that where did you put it Steve alright there we go and then we'll choose ok and now we can see everything that we get from data Smith so we want the geometry wat all the materials lights are great cameras we don't really care about but we'll do it anyway and then let's do this arrow and go down to static mesh options and this is important we don't want 512 resolution light maps it'll all make sense later but we want that to be smaller so we're just going to do 64 and 128 for now and then choose import this will take a second here you can see exactly how much complexity there there is in this model if we hadn't combined all of those mullions and all of those glass panels we would have a I think it's like 2,000 objects to work with all right and here we go so you can a right-click drag to move around left-click to select something and then while you're holding right-click W a s and D and then Q and E to move up and down pretty straightforward and here we are we have the whole building uh it looks like a very nice scale obviously the glass is white and since I selected this you can see I collapsed that group this group and then these mullions if you select those you can see yeah it all wraps around so rather than having each of those individual objects we just have smaller selections to work with if we go inside we can see we have all of that furniture we have even these railings and this is the great thing about data Smith every object has its own pivot where it should be if you were working with Revit in unreal say a year or two years ago what you would get is up here you'd have all of these thousands of objects with the same origin point at zero zero zero so if you want to select this chair and move it ten centimeters you'd select it look way over here in the distance find the pivot and you'd have to move that 10 centimeters and then come back so is very tedious very aggravating but now with the data Smith it brings in everything if you had v-ray materials applied to these in the first place you would have those in unreal I imagine they're going to have the Autodesk materials here pretty soon but they don't yet so that that is a really great thing and we'll see how the light Maps play out as well but everything is very nice and very clean and very much to scale you can see too we have the cameras that we actually had set up and rub it and they even have like the focal length and aperture that was set up there if you select one of these lights you can see we actually have the intensity values and the I don't know why it's black but the attenuation radius is that the temperature everything that was set and Revit actually came in so it's very very incredible tool for us for architectural visualization so I just selected those hit H to hide yeah so we can kinda see inside now looks pretty good so first thing we just want to go up here and choose save all just get that stuff out of our memory and commit everything all right there's one more thing we need to do very quickly we'll go into our content browser here I've made a couple folders these are just for myself you have this folder that came in with your data Smith file whatever you name that I made a textures folder which we'll get into here in a bit with a hgri folder inside of that meshes materials and then blueprints I'll I'll explain those things as we get into them but you might want to add those folders as you see fit and now one more thing we need to do we need to choose add new and go to add feature or content pack go over here to content packs and we'll choose starter content this will give us a lot of really nice materials to start with some some basic particle systems and some some good some good starting points here they actually have birds in there huh weird okay yeah so here we are we have all those materials if you choose that starter content materials section and to apply material you really just click and drag boom now that ground has grass on it I'm gonna control Z undo that and then we're just going to save all one more time and we're actually going to close the project and then you want to reopen it real quick I'm not sure why this is a necessary step but in order for us to replace materials quick and efficiently we actually need to close and reopen the project if someone could tell me why that would be great I really don't understand okay so you'll notice when we open the project again we're back in that starting map that we had go to your data Smith folder that you imported and [Music] oh okay I had an intestine yeah it'll be in your content section or if you received a prompt it's whatever you named it there all right and here we are so first of all let's get rid of all of this gnarly looking glass if we open up this material we'll see what they did for this for some reason they just gave it this diffuse color and then they desaturate and then give it almost no roughness so every material that we have looks very much like this but with a different color value very strange I don't understand why they go that route if you select your glass and then choose this icon right here it'll show you exactly where in your content browser to find that I'll select that class and then you notice there's two other glass materials I'll control click to select those as well and we're just going to hit delete and here this is important we need to choose to replace this with search M underscore glass this came in with our starter content we'll choose that so we're going to replace all of these meshes glass materials with this glass that we like so we'll replace references choose ok and save all of those alright and now you see we have this glass if we open up this glass you'll see there's a lot more going on we have this arbitrary color specularity roughness opacity and then this is for a level of detail for refraction if you're running a VR project you'll actually want to disable this so I'll left-click the refraction so you don't have glass refractive values in unreal that might be fixed after 419 but currently refraction is a big no-no for VR so choose that hit save and go up here I'm just going to close my 3ds project down save hello coffee all right so here we are again let's go up here let's go to project settings under the Edit tab let's do some early steps that we just got to get out of the way when you have a scene and you're looking around here and flying around it's applying some automatic post processes to make everything look pretty good but we don't want that we don't want it to polish the turd so to speak before we polish it ourselves or just no turds entirely please so we'll go in here uncheck blue uncheck ambient occlusion let's do both of those uncheck auto exposure and then personally I like lumens as default so I'm just going to go ahead and check those and we'll go ahead and is there anything else yeah oh go up to maps and modes up here near the top and I'm going to choose a test map which is what I named this map choose that as your default so that every time you open the project you'll enter this this map by default there you go choose save all again and we go to edit preferences this is just a personal thing I hate autosave so I'm going to go to loading and saving and uncheck enable autosave I'd like to live life on the edge a little bit all right so if we just explore scene a little bit we have this nice hallway up here on the top floor most of these offices it looks like they're all empty yeah and a lot going in there if we go down here oh yeah there's this nice little cafeteria area very a very minimal design I like it I like it this I'm going to select that delete yeah we have a nice arch here I'll explode it to that black thing that fracturing coming in here in a moment we have a some nice some nice views up here but my personal favorite right now is like a nice view of the lobby from here yes and I find a nice spot and then you go up here to this tab go down to bookmarks and set bookmark I'm going to do bookmark one so now whenever we're moving around if you hit one on your cable snaps you were right back there so as we're going forward and making progress and stuff you can use that to check your progress and see how you're doing and I'm also going to go down to this cafeteria that we'd noticed and I'll make another bookmark here and we'll do bookmark to set bookmark to so now if we go one two camera one kimber to let's go to our camera one and let scared of all that black junk up here so I go up to your world outliner it might be over here on your system I sort of rearranged mine a little bit select this one of these white circles up here you'll see uh it's this area light that they brought in with data Smith I'm not sure if this is going to be a feature in 420 or something but currently it's just a bunch of mumbo-jumbo that just gets in the way so we'll expand our view a little bit and you want to control click all of those white circles be sure you don't select these light objects we're just doing those white circles so select each of those shouldn't be too many you okay once we have all those selected you just delete them all and then let's also go to these lights yeah okay so we'll actually select the top one and then shift-click the bottom one to select all of those and hit that a control G on your keyboard to group them so if you select one of them now you select all of them that'll help us going forward instead of having to select all of those every time and I'm not sure why this light color is set to black but we don't like that so we're going to go white because we actually want to emit light and I think this is like a spotlight intensity for some reasons I'm going to turn that down to like I don't know 65 yeah and then we want to turn down the attenuation radius these lights are spreading out pretty far and I I like to keep it pretty tightly constrained so I'll go let's see try 300 let's do 400 yeah I wanted to go just past the the floor but not so far that it's you know way up here affecting the atmosphere so to speak and next let's do the same thing for those table lamps so I'm going to select those group them set those to white there we go let's turn that down to let's say 40 and then attenuation at 250 yeah there we go we'll see how those temperature values play out - I'm not sure those would look very good and then we have these lights on the wall same thing for those oh there we go and group I am set to white there we go let's do 55 there we go and let's try 350 yeah so you'll see that we already have some very basic lighting and shadow artifacts going on and everything is super reflective because of that roughness value we saw earlier so if we go in this paint we'll see it's almost set to zero roughness and then specular is set pretty high as well so we'll we'll replace all of that here in a bit but first we're just going to worry about the lighting so there are two different kinds of lights that were ever going to worry about none real there dynamic and then static dynamic lights obviously move as an object moves if you have the Sun flying across the sky you get the shadows moving across the floor if you have a player throwing a flashlight across the room you'll see that that light at the end of the flashlight spin around and move appropriately if we have a light sitting in a lamp that we know is always going to be static and always affecting the same things in the environment we want that to also be static and up here moveable is entirely dynamic static is entirely obviously static stationary on the other hand is a bit of both so we'll mix dynamic as well as static lighting if we go up here to our search and let's search light will so see we have a skylight down here now we'll come back to that in a moment but we have a Sun oh we have two skylights I'm gonna delete one of those skylights so just have one we have a Sun and here where is that son I'll just move it over here there we go these are snaps I'm just going to undo all of those I don't I don't like snapping so much hit G on the keyboard you can show and hide all of these game elements so if we unhide everything I can see the way the Sun is pointing and you'll see these shadows are indicative of that as well so I would like to let's move in here so we can see a little better I'd like to set it up so we have a nice shadow coming through the windows into the hallway here so we're just gonna turn that a little bit yeah looks good maybe something like that so we'll get a little bit on the wall we'll get some nice light bouncing through here and then we get this really nice skylight shining through the wall as well I like that I like that a lot okay and then we're not going to worry about the sky sphere quite yet we'll turn out on our Sun value to three point one three point one four it's just a sort of arbitrary value chosen for Sun I'm going to reset the temperature I'm not sure what a good value for that would be and we have this light source angle that that determines the the the amount of atmosphere that the Sun is coming through so if that is set low will have very crisp shadows but if we have set to let's do three that'll make it a much more soft and almost blurry like it's a cloudy day with the sunshine through the windows so we'll go ahead and do that we're not going to worry about any other settings for now what we'll come back to those here in a bit but notice that this is set to stationary instead of static all of our other lights should be set to static if you're going to be working with VR you're not we have two sons as well hello Tatooine yeah get you out here all right okay so we have the one son now and the one skylight and then we have all of these set to static and like I was saying in VR you always want to go static maybe have one or two stationary lights but stay away from movable lights as much as you can that has a lot of compute at runtime that you really don't want to have to struggle with later on down the line not to mention you get some really nice lighting effects if you do go baked lighting what you do with static lights so that once we have all of these set up let me look at my list make sure I'm not forgetting anything I've gone through some of those lights yeah let's let's do that skylight real quick okay so uh you can use HDR lighting in unreal HDR I if you don't know is hide in high dynamic range imaging basically it's a it's a picture that you use to light a scene so I've gone to HDR I Haven comm I'll have a link here in the description as well and on here it's a really nice website I did encourage you to support them you can choose different 360 degree HDRI images that you can use and basically we're gonna choose one of these skies and use this to light our scene so I'm really only concerned with the sky I like the variants on the ground and I like those clouds up there choose whatever you'd like man that that looks pretty good with those streaks up there but if you wanted like a cloudless day for your project you could do that if you're gonna do something crazy with a night scene that would be nice kind of like that now that's a really good one though for myself I went ahead and I already downloaded this Cape Hill I scrolled down here and I went to 8k so choose this project size here and that download that and then you just drag it right into your scene and then up here remember I had the content textures HDRI and I put that in there already so if you just drag that downloaded file into your project you'll get something like this if you open it up notice that compression settings is set to HDR that's that's important that's going to enable us to use this for HDR lighting so we'll close out of that and let's go back down to our skylight in our world outliner here and then change this captured seam to specified cubemap now we're going to drag that cube map image right in here and you can't really see quite yet but that is being used around the scene to light everything by some large value so if we set it to moveable you can kind of see how it's going to work it's very washed out right now but you can see dynamically what it would do it fill in a lot of shadows it would basically simulate everything happening outside you can see like the back of this pillar where before it was much darker yeah look like up here you can see really fills everything in so intentionally we'll just keep that at 1 let's not do anything crazy make sure it is static so we want to keep that baked and yeah since we have everything collected together we have all these mullions all these glass windows they're all transparent everything is looking pretty good check my list one more time make sure we're not forgetting anything yes most important step before we do a light build you'll notice we have 995 actors in our scene here so that's everything including everything down to these doors and we have you know the floor is one big object but the stairwells over here every single thing came in but we're not worried about those what we could even do down the line if we really wanted to would be to simply delete those but at this point I want to keep it as non-destructive as possible in case we decide we want to do some big I don't know turn this into like a paintball back or something but well not worry about that what we will do go to your modes tab and you'll search for light ass there we go we want this light mass importance volume well go ahead and drag one of those into the scene basically what this does is it tells the renderer when we bake our lighting we want to focus all of our nice lighting in that area so if you get spaced a few times you can move your gizmo or we'll just select this right up here and then we'll just drag along those gizmos and we want that to encapsulate those two areas that we talked about before that cafeteria in that top floor area so just uh here we go make it a bit bigger than our scene we don't we don't want to be too tightly constrained to the edges yeah make that a little bit bigger there we go looking good okay so we'll call it here this is a really good start last thing we're gonna do is we're gonna go up actually Wow yeah yeah we'll just go to build our lighting and we'll make sure this lighting quality is set to preview we're gonna keep it very basic as we go along just to get started not do anything too crazy and when you're all set go ahead and build this will take some time it'll run in the background be mindful that you don't move any lights or meshes and you're seeing while this is doing the light builder it's going to invalidate parts of your scene and you'll see it's exporting the light data here and then you'll get this crawling 0 to 100 percent down here in the bottom right corner you can still navigate around your scene if you'd like just be careful you don't move anything and then the next part we'll go ahead and we'll talk about how to optimize some of that lighting we'll talk about reflections because everything in here is very bright and very super reflective look at that we'll talk about some of the problems we might have with lighting down the line and then we'll talk about actually applying some of our own materials to some of these objects and make this not look like a vital plastic chair that you might stick to so I will see you in part two

Channel: Steve Biegun

Views: 66,064

Rating: 4.9487181 out of 5

Keywords: UE4, unreal engine, unreal, rendering, arch, architecture, architectural visualization, visualization

Id: aI0J3Im_JDw

Length: 32min 6sec (1926 seconds)

Published: Fri May 25 2018