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 – lighting an interior

Let’s light up our project of choice together. In the previous chapters, we learned how to import geometries using Datasmith. Now, we have our 3D scene almost ready for lighting. Before starting, I usually turn off all the glass in the scene to let the light pass through. We can do this by either giving them a glass material (which we will learn later), temporarily deleting them (we can reimport them later by right-clicking on the Datasmith actor, choosing reimport, and checking the Re-Spawn Deleted Actors option), or moving them to a temporary level. We can also simply hide them by pressing H, but remember that they will be visible again when we reopen the scene. Another thing to do is to apply a 50% gray material to everything. We can do this by either switching to lighting only visual mode with Alt + 6 or assigning this clay material to every object, but we will cover materials in the next chapter. After that, we can start placing lights...