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

Improving texture memory usage

Memory shortage is a common issue, especially in Archviz projects. In the past, I used to load high-resolution textures everywhere in my visualization projects using Corona and Vray, with most of my textures being 4k or even bigger. In simpler projects, this approach worked fine with my 64 GB of RAM. However, in Unreal Engine, you can’t continue with the same approach as it would quickly deplete your memory resources. Even powerful graphics cards such as the Nvidia RTX 4090 only have 24 GB of RAM, which is substantial but still not comparable to the RAM available in rendering workstations.

It’s crucial to keep in mind that GPU memory is used for various purposes within the scene, not just for rendering, so efficient texture management is vital to maintaining optimal performance.

Checking texture usage

The first thing to check is how much memory your textures are consuming. The main tools for this purpose are as follows:

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