2018 Architectural Visualization Survey

The 2018 Architectural Visualization Rendering Survey is an update to original 2016 Rendering Survey Responses were gathered between November 30, 2017 and February 3, 2018 via CGarchitect’s community (social media & email newsletter) and through Facebook groups associated with real-time engines and architectural visualization. CGarchitect gathered total 2063 responses. Researchers estimate that there are 150k people involved in AEC (Architecture, Engineering and Construction) visualization.

First, let's look at the results from 2016:

Evermotion Editor's comment: As you can see, V-Ray was used in production by 84% respondents (V-Ray Adv + V-Ray RT), being the most popular rendering engine on the market. We can also see that Corona Renderer gained almost 20 percent in popularity, despite the fact that the first version for 3ds Max appeared on 25th of February 2015 and was developed as alpha during 2014. New player advanced to podium very fast. 2015 was also the year, when arch-viz people started using Unreal engine for visualizations. Fast rendering, interactivity and the rise of VR were very tempting for industry, but that was only the beginning.

Now, let's see the latest results:

Evermotion Editor's comment: V-Ray is still the king of architectural visualization. There is steady number of users that use V-Ray Advanced for visualizations. With the faster development of V-Ray RT and faster GPUs with more RAM we can also see that V-Ray RT usage has risen by 8%. Corona Renderer has stabilized it's position on the market by gaining 10% more users than in 2016. It's worth noting that in November 2017 Render Legion - the developers of Corona Renderer were acquired by Chaos Group, which means that both V-Ray and Corona are now in the hands of Chaos Group.

We also see that there are ten percent more visualization artists that use Unreal Engine in production. Realtime rendering is becoming more popular not only due to faster hardware but also because of fast UE4 development, which brought volumetric lights and better GI during the period. another cause of rising popularity was, in our opinion, introduction of Datasmith - a tool for importing scenes from popular 3d software directly to Unreal Engine. There are also more educational sources showing how to use Unreal Engine in arch-viz production. We can expect that this number will grow even more in the next years. Which is visible, if we check the next infographic:

Evermotion Editor's comment: Unreal Engine is the most tested environment in architectural visualization right now, followed by Corona Renderer. We can expect that Chaos Group position, now controlling two most popular path-tracers on the market, will be unthreatened for the next years. Unreal Engine will be gaining popularity as a realtime renderer for arch-viz. We think that both paths for architectural visualizations: realtime and offline, should co-exist in the predictable future.

We could make this article thanks to courtesy of CGarchitect. For more information, full infographics and detailed data read the full version on CGArchitect.com