Unreal Engine

Unreal Engine becoming part of design

Greg Corke talks to Epic Games Enterprise about the potential of Unreal Engine in AEC and its ambition to make the real time game engine an essential tool for the design process

Unreal Engine is making big strides in architectural visualisation. The CGarchitect survey from February 2018 revealed that 21% of viz artists were using the real time game engine in production, double that from 2017.

Next year we expect these numbers to grow again, fuelled in part by the recent beta launch of V-Ray for Unreal. By offering a push-button workflow from the leading arch viz rendering engine, barriers to adoption are being removed.

“You can actually use Unreal without learning Unreal, which is what customers told us they wanted,” says Marc Petit, General Manager, Epic Games Enterprise of the workflow that automatically transfers the entire scene — materials, lights and all — into the real time engine. “Suddenly, for the same amount of effort,

they get to interactive content. They can stay in their favourite environment, do what they do, but they can now get interactive and immersive and VR for free.”

The future of Unreal Engine in creative agencies and viz studios certainly looks bright, but Epic Games is not happy for it to simply be a showcase tool for polished real time and VR experiences. It has much bigger ambitions for AEC.

“The big prize is to become part of the design process,” explains Petit, “and offer everything the platform does well — which is ingest super complex geometry, create high fidelity rendering, animation, physics, multi-user, immersion, VR support and AR support.”

Workflow is king In architecture and engineering, designs continually change, so a workflow was needed to support this fluid process. If users had to re-apply textures, materials and lighting every time there was a new design iteration, Epic knew it would be fighting a losing battle. The cost of data preparation had to be eradicated.

To support its ‘enterprise’ users, Epic developed Unreal Studio, a suite of tools designed to make it easier to work with CAD and other 3D software. Unreal Studio is currently in beta and is free to download. The beta was recently extended to run until September 2019, when it will officially launch for a monthly subscription fee of around $50.

Unreal Studio includes a number of components, including templates, assets (materials), learning tools and professional support, but it’s the Datasmith workflow toolkit that is most important, as it streamlines the flow of data from CAD into the Unreal Engine Editor.

Datasmith works with a number of applications, including SketchUp Pro, Rhino, 3ds Max and SolidWorks, either through plug-ins or direct import. Support for other applications, including Revit, are also in development, as Petit explains. “Revit is such a closed environment, so it’s a tough nut to crack, but we’re working on it now.”

Unreal Studio 4.20, released in July this year, took a massive leap forward with the introduction of non-destructive workflows. Now, when a design model changes and is re-imported, any investment that has been made in Unreal Engine is maintained.

“There’s always a new version of the MEP model, a new version of the architectural model — and so the non-destructive workflow means that all the edits

and decisions that you’ve made in Unreal get reapplied automatically when you reimport,” explains Petit. “Or we optimise — I mean if you re-import a hotel and you only change the door knobs, we’ll figure it out. We don’t need to re-import the doors and the walls, we’ll just re-import the door knobs. All of this optimisation helps you be more productive.”

Building on the foundation of nondestructive workflows, the next step for Unreal Studio is to support live streaming between the design tools and Unreal Engine. This capability, which is earmarked for release later this year, should have a massive impact on how Unreal is embraced throughout the design process. Architects, engineers or clients alike will be able to instantly visualise the impact of design changes in the visually rich Unreal environment, a feature that has made tools like Enscape so popular with architects.

“We already do it for Maya — live streaming — and we are now going to bring it to products like SketchUp. So, you can actually have someone in the workflow modelling in SketchUp, streaming to the engine,” explains Petit. “We needed the non-destructive workflow first because it’s a form of live update. You don’t read from a file, you read from a stream.”

Data optimisation In 3D games, datasets undergo an incredible amount of optimisation to ensure good performance on screen and in VR. And, as long as the scene delivers the right look and feel, then geometry can be simplified dramatically.

AEC is different in that geometry generally needs to be very accurate, so designs are not over simplified. Furthermore, with designs continually evolving, firms don’t have the luxury of spending hours optimising every new dataset. The process is made more complicated if assets need to be simultaneously pushed out to different platforms — PC, mobile, VR or AR — and at various Levels of Detail (LoD), with different polygon budgets for quality and performance.

In short, the process needs a significant level of automation.

With Unreal Studio 4.20 users are now able to prioritise which objects can be heavily optimised and which should not be optimised, using a combination of metadata and Python scripts.

Petit recalls an issue on a recent customer project, “There was a big problem with the urinals in a stadium because, for some reason in VR, it was not performing. We ran an analysis and we realised that there were a lot of urinals [with complex geometry] that were getting Unreal Studio “There are two things we are processed, not fully rendered, Datasmith offers a looking at,” adds Petit. “One is, but processed. ‘non-destructive’ workflow between of course, recognising shapes.

“You can now tag those as Trimble SketchUp and You can tell that a cup is a cup, second-class citizens. You can Unreal Engine and you then have strategies to write a script that says, oh my optimise a cup. We could also god, this is not an important piece, I’m start to develop semantics around some going to decimate the hell out of it.” metadata and start to automate decision

In many BIM workflows, metadata is making based on that.” prevalent, so standard classifications and Petit is keen to emphasise any discusscripts can be used across projects to help sions on machine learning are very promanage polygon budgets more effectively. spective and acknowledges that object However, Unreal is also exploring ways to recognition is very complex, “You can harness the power of machine learning so train a machine to recognise a screw, but Unreal Engine would be able to automati- you need a lot of data, you need to show it cally ‘recognise’ objects and process them a lot of screws and we haven’t worked out accordingly when metadata is not present who we partner with to do that aspect.” or in the right format.

“Right now, a human would have to The learning curve interpret the metadata but ultimately, you Unreal Engine is a very powerful tool; the could have a very simple machine learn- rendering quality is superb and due to get ing layer on top of it and say “It’s a screw, I even better with the promise of real time don’t care about a screw, it’s going to be a ray tracing using Nvidia RTX technology. cylinder. Or it could be used to add behav- But it is also known for its complexity and iours, like ‘this is a door of a certain type, steep learning curve. It is also important to and this is how it should open’. understand that Unreal Engine is a soft-

ware development platform, for creating a that are addressable for you — a library. Navisworks, “We don’t have clash detecgame or an application, and not an off-the- But you’ll always be able to go back [and tion out of the box, but our physics shelf software tool. This makes it very dif- use all the features if you wish].” engine is really good,” says Petit, adding ferent to something like Enscape, which is Even with this hand holding, some will that there are also prototypes for cutting designed specifically for architects and still find Unreal Engine too complicated planes / live sections. laser-focused on ease of use. And while for their needs. And it’s here that thirdlarge architectural practices have the lux- party developers look set to play an The aggregation platform ury of in-house viz teams with the increasingly important role. Epic Games has a long-term ambition for advanced programming skills needed to Twinmotion, the real time visualisa- Unreal Engine to become a hub for all get the most out of the software, smaller tion and VR tool designed for architects, AEC data throughout the design process firms need more hand holding. is a prime example. The latest release, and beyond, “We’re seeing this in con-

Epic Games acknowledges this and is built around Unreal Engine, is designed struction already, people are assembling working hard to help newcomers get up to be easy to use and offers live links to MEP models, architectural models, and running quickly. With SketchUp, for Revit and ArchiCAD. structural models and using Unreal example, providing that the SketchUp Epic Games is actively looking for Engine as an aggregation platform.” assets are well modelled and the materi- more third-party developers to bring Petit also believes the co-ordinated als applied correctly, the plug-in auto- industry-specific workflow expertise to model should not be limited to visualisamatically translates cameras, materials, the game engine and makes the source tion. “Right now, you aggregate in 3ds max and geometry into Unreal Engine assets. code freely available. “We acknowledge and do a beautiful picture and aggregate in

Unreal Studio also includes templates that every market segment has real Navisworks to make all the decisions. to use as a starting point for architectural problems [workflow challenges] and “People will soon realise they can do projects into which users can simply they deserve to have dedicated applica- this in the same platform; it will generate drop their model. Then, by using tions,” says Petit. “We want to partner a lot of saving.” Blueprint, Unreal’s visual scripting lan- with the people that are going to bring And those savings could potentially be guage, users can go on to add life to a scene, as Simon Jones, Director, Unreal ‘‘ The notion of using a single asset that could be huge. The notion of using a single asset that could be adapted to different workEngine Enterprise adapted to different workflows throughout the flows as and when required, explains. “Blueprint is modular, so we can have libraries. If you want to credesign, supporting engineering and aesthetic decision making, is incredibly powerful supporting engineering and aesthetic decision making throughout the design proate some function in a scene, let’s say you want the door to swing and you want it to make a those dedicated applications.” ’’ cess, is incredibly powerful. The visual fidelity of the engine may grab the headlines, but the noise while it swings and maybe cast The obvious value for third party devel- way in which it can handle colossal datalight into the scene as it reflects light, opers is access to an extremely high quali- sets in multi-user environments promises now, that could be a blueprint that exists ty, high performance game engine, but the to deliver a strong foundation for collabosomewhere in a library that you just lift benefits don’t end there. Unreal Engine rative AEC workflows. to drop into your scene and apply it to offers out of the box support for VR (with Petit acknowledges the engine is not yet that object, that door.” HMDs and CAVES) and AR for use on the ready to take up the mantle as the all-

Jones is adamant that Epic Games is not construction site. There is also a huge encompassing multi resolution, multigoing to introduce multiple versions of potential for collaborative design across purpose generator of ‘digital twins’, “We Unreal Engine, say one for architectural distributed teams, as Petit explains, “It’s a need more data types, we could be better at visualisation, another for auto design. game engine and has all the features for terrain, we could be better at point clouds, “We can never genuinely predict what fea- collaboration — voice chat, multi user.” we still have work to do, but the premise tures people will use,” he says “It would be Unreal Engine could even be used to and the promise are very good. The potenarrogant of us, probably foolish of us, to perform roles traditionally carried out by tial is overwhelming,” he concludes. eliminate features that other industries engineering-focused products like ■ unrealengine.com/studio are using,” citing virtual production TV and film techniques, such as green screens, as examples of features that are increasingly being used in design viz. Unreal Engine - how much does it cost?

“We may introduce a templated front end, so you can select, as you fire up the There is a lot of confusion applicable and architects and will start from $49 per month, engine, that you’re an architect — and maybe later you can say what type of surrounding licensing for Unreal Engine and how much it costs. In short, anyone can creative agencies needn’t pay a dime if they don’t wish to. However, those who place a which seems money well spent. The beta is currently free. Epic Games Enterprise also architect you are, maybe how advanced use the engine for free, but if value on professional ticketed offers bespoke licensing agreeyou are — and then we’re going to pre- you make a product that you support, viz templates, materi- ments for larger firms that may sent to you the way to use the engine in the way that you understand it. sell – a game, for example – you pay a royalty on those transactions. als, tutorials and the nondestructive CAD-to-Unreal Datasmith workflows, will need need special help with pipelines, custom workflows, support plans or simply need

“For example, we might start you off As design viz doesn’t involve an Unreal Studio subscription. changes to the Unreal Engine with a scene that looks like a room, and the creation of commercial Unreal Studio launches offi- Studio EULA (End User you can bring in your own content and products, no royalties are cially in September 2019 and License Agreement). adapt it. We might pre-load some materials