Best way to set up moving parts for arch viz?

Development Architectural and Design Visualization
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1

I work at a pretty large furniture company and over the past couple years I got us working in UE for quick, easy, and remote previz for catalog shots. I’ve been modeling our whole library for both realtime and renders, and we’ve even been able to render out final shots for print with the improvements to path tracer. Loving the workflow.

One snag I’ve hit is, how do I best setup furniture with moving parts? Adjustable desks, or casters on rolling furniture, for example. Blend shapes don’t update in the editor until you hit play, so no good for these live working sessions. Setting casters or doors up on bones would be great, but again, not directly editable in the editor and it seems I’d need to bake a mesh for each position I’d want to try? There has to be a clean solution to this that I’m not seeing. Anyone got any tips?

2

Maybe I’m not quite getting what you mean, but in your example of moving doors / furniture, you can just the construction script to position the item in various scenarios.

3

What about a chair with casters or a desk with an adjustable height? Is the best way really to import two separate objects and tack them together with a construction script? Manually positioning wheels on the bottom of a bunch of different furniture models would add up to a lot of work. Hoping there’s something a little cleaner…

4

You could use two objects, but then you only get A or B.

If you go to the trouble of making the casters adjustable, then you can adjust them.

There’s no free lunch I’m afraid… :wink: