Setting up unreal for ArchViz in office

Hi all,

Apologies if this has been asked before - and before anyone says, I promise I have had a look at the documentation (it’s vast!).

I currently work at an architectural practice and manage the graphics/visualisation team. Currently we use Sketchup/3DS Max to model, and either Enscape (Sketchup) for rendering, or VRay (3DS max) when we’re doing more high-end stuff.

We’re pretty au-fait with our current softwares, however we are extremely impressed with some of the results we’ve seen arch-viz houses getting out of unreal engine and are looking to evaluate Unreal Engine to see if it can bridge the gap that we currently have between Enscape (quick, realtime, super simple) and 3DS Max/VRay (Hyper-realistic, able to handle huge amounts of geometry, supports animation). We have previously looking into Unreal, but sadly our deadlines/workload meant that it was always pushed to the back of our minds - however I feel this can’t continue…

My question is how do we best set up Unreal Engine in our office? We don’t have a huge production pipeline (something that the documentation seems geared towards) - there are two of us, sometimes three.

How do we go about setting up Unreal Engine so that our projects are network based in much the same way our current projects in 3ds max are (projects in their own folders, referencing textures/assets that are also on the network in their own folders, etc)?

Or is this not how it is done?

I want to make sure we get these first steps right before we proceed onto any of the more “fun” stuff.

I hope my post makes sense - I’m happy to clarify anything if you have any questions, any help is much appreciated.

Thank you in anticipation,
Chris

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Nobody with even a tiny bit of advice?

Hi Chris,

At Studio4D we work with UE for realtime interactive visualizartion projects. No idea what the best practice is, but instead of working with files over the network we use Perforce as our version control repository. You can host it locally or chose some cloud provider.

We host in on the cloud, so everyone works on his local workspace, and then they upload to the repo. This allows us to collaborate (even remotely) and gives us the plus of version control, that comes in handy when something breaks, we just recover a previous working version a go on from there.

Hope this helps! I can point you to some tutorials on how to get started if this approach sounds good to you.

Cheers!

Alejandro