Hi Everyone.
I suppose this is a good thread to put down my newb questions to you Unreal Vis pros without clogging the board as it is somewhat relevant.
First off, I recently left the archvis industry because I grew to hate it for various reasons. I also do work with a film collective and we are exploring doing a short cg animated film. I suggested that it could possibly be done in real-time CG so they want to see some sort of proof of concept and I have two weeks to deliver. So I decided to take some of my past projects from work to create a test film to show render quality. Now a little background, while I’m a newb to unreal but I was doing real-time arch vis since the late 90’s and not much has changed from purely “workflow” perspective.
1 Is there a way to visualize potential light map errors prior to rendering? People on here are saying Unreal is so amazing and great and there is no rendering yayyyy!!!, but I’ll bake it for a day and see errors on completion and I have to fix them and put it back in the oven for another 6-8 hours(I’m doing a full house on a single quad core). Is there a way to at least see what surfaces will receive zero bounces forget about splotches.
2 So are we lightmapping all entourage/props. Do I need to light map that bowl of fruit or book on the table as well?
3 Should I create my materials prior to rendering the light map? How do the materials affect the actual light map other than diffuse colors and reflection/opacity?
4 Lastly and off topic, I have been using matinee to create clips but started using the sequencer since it seems easier and can fit on the same screen as the main view. When I go to create a movie with the sequencer I get a black screen for a second and it records nothing. Could I be missing something? Do i need a blueprint code to record a sequence like with matinee and if so what code would I need or what else would I be doing wrong? Is there a sequencer tutorial even though its experimental.
Now my last boss used to price per image like most vis people but due to his reputation he was very expensive compared to average company. He would then back all of our hourly cost into the fee. He knew who was good and fast at what and who was weak at other things. And that included practically unlimited changes since the client always requested tons of them. I feel most of you are going to be selling Unreal as a rendering alternative and I think that’s dangerous as Arch vis clients expect lots of revisions and they don’t care about how you do it. I would do it like a software co or an ad agency and price it at a higher fixed project cost and back everything into that through hourly and expenses. With project management software you can project profitability. The client expects changes and you would need to know your software to guess render times with some accuracy. My company would render overnight and provide the changes 1st thing in the morning and would get redlines back before lunch, rinse, repeat. And most changes were minor and but would absolutely need a re-rendering in Unreal.