Architectural Visualization

I need to do some residential, architectural videos. Would this be a good/viable workflow:

Revit to Max. Add grass & high detailed grass, flowers, trees in Max. Then FBX out and bring into Unreal Engine for video creation?

Advice/suggestions are welcome! Thanks

For grass/foliage you’re going to have to set that up differently, if there’s too much geometry it won’t work well in a game engine. For plants you’d want to instance them as much as possible in UE4. There’s things like Level of Detail also which can be used to decrease the quality of stuff as it gets further away, which you’d need to do with things like grass.

As for the architectural geometry, again try and instance stuff as much as possible in UE4, for the other things make sure you split things up because each individual object is going to have a lightmap and if the object is too big then the lightmap won’t be able to have enough detail. Plus the engine won’t render things that aren’t visible so you want to make sure that some stuff will be able to be hidden by being off screen. If things are really big like if you did all of the walls as a single static mesh then it would always be visible and would have to render a bunch of areas you can’t even see.

[=;46307]
For grass/foliage you’re going to have to set that up differently, if there’s too much geometry it won’t work well in a game engine. For plants you’d want to instance them as much as possible in UE4. There’s things like Level of Detail also which can be used to decrease the quality of stuff as it gets further away, which you’d need to do with things like grass.

As for the architectural geometry, again try and instance stuff as much as possible in UE4, for the other things make sure you split things up because each individual object is going to have a lightmap and if the object is too big then the lightmap won’t be able to have enough detail. Plus the engine won’t render things that aren’t visible so you want to make sure that some stuff will be able to be hidden by being off screen. If things are really big like if you did all of the walls as a single static mesh then it would always be visible and would have to render a bunch of areas you can’t even see.
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Thank you very much! I appreciate the insight that you provided.

Honestly, I don’t see why you wouldn’t just do this in MAX. MAX does video quite well. The only reason I can see to use a game engine for this purpose is to create an interactive experience.

However, a walkthrough would be very cool in UE4, using the Realistic Rendering sample as a starting point. Think of it: Your clients can walk up, open the front door, tour the building. Then head outside to tour the grounds. All at their leisure. Using triggers you can set up pop-up informational blurbs - room sizes, notes about customization options, selling points (like “the skylights in the kitchen let the sun in to brighten your meal times!”), etc.

[=VegasRich;49015]
Honestly, I don’t see why you wouldn’t just do this in MAX. MAX does video quite well. The only reason I can see to use a game engine for this purpose is to create an interactive experience.

However, a walkthrough would be very cool in UE4, using the Realistic Rendering sample as a starting point. Think of it: Your clients can walk up, open the front door, tour the building. Then head outside to tour the grounds. All at their leisure. Using triggers you can set up pop-up informational blurbs - room sizes, notes about customization options, selling points (like “the skylights in the kitchen let the sun in to brighten your meal times!”), etc.
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You are right… Max can do awesome video. The last video I did took 3 Titans 40 hours. That was for 30 seconds of video. I am not too impressed with Lumion, so I am looking at other solutions.

Your marketing idea sounds pretty cool! Do you feel that I can achieve the level of realism that would properly showcase architectural work? Thank you.

Hi ,

That is definitely a possibility with the engine. For instance, have a look at the realistic rendering sample. As the engine is built in 1uu=1cm measurement, you can set everything to the scale you are looking for and make aspects of the building functional (turning on/off lights, opening doorways, provide sounds that give the proper feel to the space, etc).

[= Eicholtz;49064]
The last video I did took 3 Titans 40 hours. That was for 30 seconds of video.
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That’s quick :D… It took the makers of Avatar over a year to render the film in 3ds Max on thousands of work stations. And the finished rendered output was three petabytes :), one third the size of Google’s server storage!
I agree with the other post, in that this would only be feasible for an interactive Architectural visualisation. 3ds Max and Maya can render complete films, as in Avatar.