Hello, I have shown this project before but now I sort of finished it and I wanted to show the final result. I could probably work on it forever but I want to move on to something more sophisticated. This one after all is meant to be a ‘standard every day’ project, nothing architectural challenging. Here are 2 videos from 2 of the 4 units (I didn’t finish all 4).
Suggestions and comments are welcome. It still seems to stutter a little bit but I couldn’t figure out why as it is captured with 50fps in unreal. There is also the occasional minor popping and flickering but I was too lazy to cut it out.
It isn’t a real project but it is based on a real location:
The project is made mostly with ‘game assets’. So almost every asset is a low poly model and baked from a high poly model. I only bake the normals and AO in substance designer. Then I use a master material to combine up to 3 detail materials into one material ID. Most assets have only one material ID and most of them use the same master material.
I’m not sure what the frame rate for the usual unreal arch viz project is. This one runs on an average of 90 fps in the editor (Geforce 1070) and I think it would be fine for the Oculus Rift VR. One of the goals of this project was to have it run fast. It’s always a balance between detail and performance. I didn’t want to just throw un-optimized vray assets into the scene (with a very few exceptions).
This looks great! My only advice would be to remove the lens flares and auto exposure in your post process. These are causing some issues with recording - and will certainly cause problems with VR.
Could you elaborate about what you are doing with the materials and master materials? I haven’t established a good workflow for material organization for arch vis, so I’m very curious about what you mean.
Thanks for the feedback SBiegun. I’ll think about the lens flares but I do like them a bit. We play around with camera values like aperture to make it look more realistic and lens flares do happen. But I agree that many people dislike them, especially clients.
Having exposure enabled isn’t really an option if you go from the inside to the outside and back to the inside. Our eyes adjust. I tried it without but it doesn’t work for me. But you are right it shouldn’t be that visible. I should have cut out some of it.
About the master material: In ArchViz we don’t have grunge or wear. All of our textures are clean. This makes a large diffuse covering the whole object obsolete. So I only have AO and normals covering the entire object, eg a piece of furniture. Then I use detail diffuse, normals and masks which are tiling. I can have up to 3 layers of materials within the master materials. There is only one id per object usually which reduces draw calls. Draw calls are causing the most problems in big scenes.
You do know how to make master materials and instances? Otherwise check the epic tutorials. A master material is the same as a material but you use parameters for some textures and values. You can change those values in the material instance. You can have instances of instances which is very handy if you just want to change the color for example. It is a ‘must’ to use in any material library. I can go into a bit more detail if you want.
