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

Baked lighting

We have already defined light baking as a process that inserts lights and shadows into a specific texture. Now, let’s see how we can achieve this in Unreal Engine 5. There are two ways to process indirect light calculations: through CPU Lightmass and with GPULM. But before we begin, we need to prepare the scene for baking lights. Lumen is not compatible and therefore needs to be turned off. We can do that by going to Project Settings and choosing None for Global Illumination. To proceed with light baking, we need to pay attention to reflections in the scene and UV coordinates for various meshes, and then learn how to perform the light baking itself. Let’s explore these steps together.

Reflections

Baked lights are more efficient than dynamic lights because they don’t change during gameplay, but they have a drawback: they don’t create any reflection data for the scene. So, if we want to have reflections with baked lighting, we need to...