@Ronen - how would you suggest we showcase the realtime environment for the final? Would you prefer still frames, screenshots, or even a movie?

Welcome to CONVERTED @simplychen

For the final a pre-recorded animation for sure. I will post more about how to deliver the REAL-TIME entries in a week or two.

Awesome, thanks for the heads up!

Really interesting building. Looking forward to seeing your UE work. I was also considering the realtime route, but never having used it was concerned about trying to do too much on this project! - is it a steep learning curve? Best of luck!

@Flowstorm UE provides multitudes of features and contains technical aspects that makes the medium daunting to pick up; however, I think most of the basic process for archviz is more or less straight forward and somewhat well-documented.

The largest stumbling block we tend to overlook as ‘traiditional’ archviz artists who’s used to using offline renderers is the process of optimizing your assets/scenes. Therefore, knowing some game development and the process it entails would help you stay efficient when working in your scenes. Sites like Polycount, Flipped Normals, 80 level, and Unreal Online Learning are great ways to start learning the pipeline and jargons.

Since the introduction of Datasmith, Epic has been expanding and streamlining the export/import process from whichever DCC program of your choosing. But up to this point, my experience tends to end up working with models provided by clients which aren’t at all suitable for straight import and/or can get messy to optimize with each design changes.

Hence, I’d like to explore the way an environment artists would in a game dev pipeline, e.g. baking hero objects from high poly to low poly, using trimsheets, atlas, etc. This is the time consuming part, but I think it’s worth knowing if you plan to leverage the game engine for realtime needs. I may not nail every single thing, but hey, might as well use this opportunity to learn. So I am not at all concerned about placing at all.