Viability of Architectural Visualization on Android/iOS powered devices using Unreal Engine

[Raghu]

@Nicolas3D;383591

Your thoughts are basically the same ones I encountered while thinking about the best approach to ArchViz without having too much to downgrade.

First thought was to go with GearVR mostly because of the wifi possibilities, but current limitations are too much and the results, in terms of quality and performance, are too much to get a stunning visual feedback, which is one of the strongest point in the end, because the customer don’t care about polys and shader optimization, they want to see how things will look so they can have the possibility to see/change/modify/remove/add whatever they want and have a visual feedback almost as real as the real thing itself.
Currently the technology is not developed enough to have a scene like the ones floating on this forum to run as good on a smartphone ( and needs to be rendered twice! ) and it’ll be a couple of years since the hardware will be good enough, but it’ll also be always behind a Desktop PC.

The DK2 and HTC Vive currently are the strongest devices you can use to get the best results, but you’re tied to the cables and tracking camera…so what’s the catch?

I already did lots of 360° photos using my DSLR, PTGui and PanoTour, but that is something which can be done for existing places…so what I was also doing was to get 360° images within Maya from a project to get “virtual apartments” to be viewed in a 360° picture with some interactive elements ( very few ).

Right now available on UE4 the 360° panoramic exporter is freaking cool and could be a temporarely solution…

I would say that 360° pictures may do the job right, but can’t be compared with a UE4 scene combined with the DK2, which is top notch right now…

Point is that if you’re working on something which doesn’t currently existing but its just an architectural project, you steel need to do modeling, UVs, shading, animations so if you’re using Maya or UE4 80% of the job needs to be done for both of them, then you can choose to create 360° photos in Maya and create a (limited ) virtual walkthrough or go full VR with DK2/Vive.
Considering the amount of work you put in to create everything I will say that the DK2 solution is the most elegant and worthy thing to do in order to have a visual feedback that can’t be compared to a static render or a 360° photo.

I hope to blow your mind in 1-2 months showing the project I’m currently working on

I am ready for my mind to be blown away…:eek:

Very well said. VR is something to look forward here.