Book Image

Architectural Visualization in Unreal Engine 5

By : Ludovico Palmeri
Book Image

Architectural Visualization in Unreal Engine 5

By: Ludovico Palmeri

Overview of this book

If you excel at creating beautiful architectural renderings offline, but face challenges replicating the same quality in real time, this book will show you how the versatile Unreal Engine 5 enables such transformations effortlessly. While UE5 is widely popular, existing online training resources can be overwhelming and often lack a focus on Architectural visualization. This comprehensive guide is designed for individuals managing tight deadlines, striving for photorealism, and handling typical client revisions inherent to architectural visualization. The book starts with an introduction to UE5 and its capabilities, as well as the basic concepts and principles of architectural visualization. You’ll then progress to essential topics such as setting up a project, modeling and texturing 3D assets, lighting and materials, and post-processing effects. Along the way, you’ll find practical tips, best practices, and hands-on exercises to develop your skills by applying what you learn. By the end of this UE5 book, you'll have acquired the skills to confidently create high-quality architectural visualizations in Unreal Engine and become proficient in building an architectural interior scene in UE5 to produce professional still images.
Table of Contents (24 chapters)
1
Part 1: Building the Scene
6
Part 2: Illuminating and Materializing the Scene
12
Part 3: Completing the Scene
16
Part 4: Rendering the Scene
Appendix:Substrate Materials

Project – creating your first decal

We are going to create a decal that will be useful for our project scene. Specifically, we want to create scratches and dirty markings for the wooden floor. These elements add undeniable realism to the scene. By using a decal to do this, we gain great flexibility in terms of positioning and avoid the need to create a super complex Material with masks, which would inevitably end up being repetitive. Follow these steps:

  1. To begin, right-click inside the Content Browser and create a new master Material named D_scratches. Open the Material editor and select the main Material node. Change Domain to Deferred Decal and Blend Mode to Translucent.
  2. In our case, the scratches will mainly alter the Normal and Roughness values, not the Base Color (although they might in other cases). To achieve this, we use the same expression we used for Normals in the PBR Material, and we plug a simple scalarParameter for Roughness, setting it to a high value...