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

Discovering the Material Editor

Unreal Engine Materials determine the characteristics of objects in a scene, controlling their visual appearance. They provide instructions to the rendering engine on how surfaces interact with light, encompassing aspects such as color, reflectivity, texture, and transparency. These calculations rely on data from images, Material Expressions, and Material settings and happen “under the hood.”The place where everything takes place is the Material editor, so let’s start learning about it.

Material Editor interface

Creating shaders for your project in Unreal Editor does not require you to write any code – not directly at least. Instead, you can use the Material Editor, a visual scripting interface, to generate assets called Materials. These Materials are constructed by combining Material Expressions, which are nodes in a shader Graph. The results from these Material Expressions are then passed into the inputs of the Main...