From what I’ve seen, only a few arch firms are interested in moving forwards with technology in terms of visualisations. The industry just seems to be a bit stubborn and a lot of them are quite fine with just using and conventional static renders. Hell, some of them are still resistant to using Autodesk Revit.
I’m working on my graduation project with an architectural firm and UE4 and they were more than happy to supply the CAD model of one of their current projects but unfortunately it came from Vectorworks which I had no familiarity in so it took a bit of shuffling around to get it to work. The model wasn’t very complete either, they don’t particularly pay attention to interior details like skirting boards, door frames, doors etc so all of that had to be modelled by hand (as per the customer’s finishing schedule). I had to extrapolate and model the terrain data from the surveyor’s CAD file as well which was a whole other issue.
But yeah, my firm/client wasn’t too fussed with the interactive/blueprint component of UE4 like switching materials or turning on lights or closing doors. They’re much more interested in:
- How real and accurate you can make the environment
- How efficient it is in terms of workflow
- How fast can you create an environment