Hello Unreal World!

Development Architectural and Design Visualization
1

Hi everybody! My name is George, im 32 years old, currently living in the UK, and i am new to Unreal Engine and the 3d environment in general. I have a bit of a background in computer graphics and animation, i used to do flash based web sites, but this was back in the days when Macromedia owned Flash, not Adobe ;) I also did a fair amount of Photoshop. But now i want to give Architectural visualization a try, especially after ive seen Benoit Dereaus UNREAL PARIS 1.2 - Virtual Tour i was blown away by it and its
something i would really enjoy doing. And i have a cute project i want to start with, too, a small chapel here in my town that i would like to make a virtual tour of. And i would also like to make a short video presentation of the finished project.

Now comes the tricky part. How do i start? I looked around and found a free 3d modeling software and i have found (and installed) Blender. Because i cannot afford a subscription to maya or 3ds max it had to be free. I do have a subscription to Photoshop.
I know my request is weird but i was wondering if someone can give me some advice on how to do it, and where to start from. I was thinking to start learning Blender and UE4 in the same time, building the chapel inside blender then exporting it into UE4 for
texturing, lighting, rendering, music/sounds and making it a vr tour.
Or can i do everything inside unreal engine? Olso i have set for myself a time frame of 7 months to do this, working 4 hours each day on learning the software, learning about lights, photo-realistic rendering techniques and other thing i might need to learn to do
this project.
I currently have UE4 v 10 and v 12 installed.

I hope this makes some sense:"))

Regards
George.

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You should first learn how to do modeling in Blender, there’s plenty of tutorials on that.

Pick one asset, like a pillar for the chapel, or a bench, or a lamp, but keep it simple.

Learn how to do sub division modeling and create a low and high poly mesh for that asset.

Once that is down, learn how to UV map, bake, and texture that object. For UVing you can do that in Blender. For baking, do it in Blender, or try xNormal or the Handplane3d baker if you want something better and free. You’ll have to use another program to create the texture, at the most basic and free level there is gimp, then there’s a photoshop subscription for $10 a month, or Substance Designer and Painter for $20 a month with the money spent going towards the price of a license. You could also get the Quixel Suite for $100. All decent options. I personally believe photoshop is horrible for texturing for games, since it was never intended to do that.

But anyway, once you have a UV map, even before you texture an asset, you can try putting it in a scene in UE4. I’d suggest using one of the free content example or market place scenes, and just throwing it in and baking the lighting and just playing around with the editor and what you can do with the asset. Once you’re done texturing, you can create a custom material and put it on your asset as well.

From there, make more assets as start working on a scene. You should be able to figure out how to create and get an asset in UE4 in about a week or two. But actually getting good and modeling and texturing, that’s going to take months.