100% UE4 Archvis Contest sponsored by Epic Games, Official Questions Thread

Development Architectural and Design Visualization
1

Hey All,

I’m Wyeth Johnson from Epic Games. Recently we partnered with Ronen Bekerman to sponsor the biggest cash prize pool in ArchVis history, 100% realtime, 100% in UnrealEngine 4. It’s called “The Vineyard”.

9cdd2ecd351d789f9eeb8153c898d7257028ae9e.jpeg

https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/epic-games-and-ronen-bekerman--the-vineyard-challenge

Our interest in the archvis community grew organically from people out in the world downloading Unreal and doing amazing things we never expected. Every day some new visualization comes out that blows us away.

For example, Benoit Dereau’s Unreal Paris:

All of Koola’s amazing work:

CG Cloud’s London Loft:

And of course we at Epic aren’t sitting on our realistic rendering hands either, this time focusing on exterior rendering with our GDC realtime demo, A Boy and his Kite:

All the tools are out there to make insane things, and we want everyone from our amazing community to participate.

The challenge is to design a modern winery setting, entirely in Unreal. The challenge runs for 12 weeks so everyone has plenty of time, and we are accepting individual entrants as well as group entrants.

The prizes, by the way, are awesome. We’ll have $25k for the grand group entry, $12.5k for the individual winner, $7500 for the group runner up, and $3500 for the individual Runner up, along with Nvidia TitanX graphics cards for all those categories. (Thanks Nvidia!) We’re also awarding $2k for categories like Best Lighting, Best Materials, Best Interactivity, and so on, and Nvidia 980ti cards for each of those categories as well.

We also have some great judges for the contest including Ash Thorp, design guru and director of project 2501, and Kim Libreri; Epic CTO, film CG visionary, multiple technical academy award winner and inventor of the bullet time tech in The Matrix.

To make an official entry, sign up and get started here:

I’ll be visiting everyone here in this thread and at Ronenbekerman.com constantly to answer any questions you might have, help guide you along, cheer you on, and we’ll also be featuring participants from our own community here on our livestreams, twitter, blog, and so on.

We cannot WAIT to see what you all do with this challenge. Good luck!

Wyeth

2

I think this needs more hype! :smiley: 2 Friends and me are joining. So far, we have some good progress, but I am definitely struggling with the nature of the environment for this contest^^

We planned for a really lush and beautiful environment with lots of foliage and nice architecture, but foliage and lightmass dont like each other too well and dynamic lighting (which looks awesome on foliage btw) does completely not work for proper archviz.
So for me it will be super interesting to see which ways of making it work I can find and also what others can come up with :slight_smile: Should be quite some good knowledge sharing going on and I for myself am really looking forward to see great results!

btw: here is our thread http://forums.ronenbekerman.com/showthread.php?t=8462

Cheers!

3

Hi,
I read something that the challenge takes time until 15th september. And something like we not allowed to publish the project during the challenge. So, when can we publish our project? After September the 15th?

4

Quick simple question. The vineyard demo uses some static and stationary lighting. Are static and stationary lighting allowed as long as the walkthrough is still in real-time?

To me, real-time means dynamic everything, including lighting.

As soon as I know this, I can start putting something together. I don’t want to get part way through and find out that any lighting was okay and I have lowered my standards, or that I incorporated area lighting and two pass lightmaps and I can’t do that.

Thanks!,

5

Sure static lighting is allowed…there is no viable dynamic G.I solution yet anyway! Real-time just mean you can play your level, that it’s not pre-rendered or static.

6

@master_rigel: Real-time means it renders right before your eyes, which covers any video game graphics like Unreal Engine. There is no way they would be disqualifying lightmaps, as Lightmass is the power behind so many of Unreal’s favorite ArchViz scenes that it loves to show off. The key is that the images are not rendered “offline”.