Just a few days ago, Epic Games released an early version of its latest installment of the Unreal Engine 5. In recent years Unreal Engine has been gaining more and more recognition of architectural visualizers, offering high-quality lighting of 3d scenes, a great material editor, good post-processing and amazing speed.
Unreal Engine: from games to arch-viz
Unreal Engine 4 allowed the creation of architectural scenes that are fully interactive. Visualizers using UE4 can render animations in minutes instead of days. Of course, all this did not come without flaws - the preparation of the scene for the Unreal Engine requires more work, and after importing, the lighting has to be baked, which can take several hours even on powerful computers. And each change in the scene requires another light baking. The output of Unreal Engine 4 is spectacular, but the workload is sometimes huge, so switching from a traditional program to visualization was not always sensible from an economic point of view.
Over time, the creators of Unreal Engine improved the accessibility of their engine - they created Datasmith - an automatic asset import system, facilitating the integration of scenes from, 3ds Max or many other graphics programs. There was also a fan-based and then an official project of light baking with GPU, which significantly accelerated this process.
Count to five
But only now, with the release of Unreal Engine 5, we can talk about a real breakthrough. UE5 gives us a new global illumination engine - Lumen. It does not require baking, it works in real time and i looks amazing. In addition, Unreal Engine introduced Nanite, which allows you to use millions of polygons in scenes. UE5 is natively integrated with Quixel Bridge asset browser and library which makes it a powerful tool for creating visualizations that we can render in real time.
Unreal Engine 5 can be downloaded from the Epic Games Launcher in the UE5 tab. Once downloaded, it will appear in the library. Now you just need to run it.
I am opening the first scene from the Evermotion Archinteriors for Unreal Engine vol. 4 collection. This scene can be purchased at Evermotion store, the link is provided in the description of this video. You can also download it as part of the Evermotion Pass, our new subscription service that allows you to download all Evermotion models and materials for a small monthly fee. It's worth checking out!
The scene was originally created for Unreal Engine 4, but we will easily adapt it to work in Unreal Engine 5. Once we have downloaded and unpacked our scene, click the "Browse" button and open the scene from local drive. Click "Skip conversion" to save some time.
You can play endlessly with the new engine, it's a very powerful tool, so it's best to just experiment. Have fun!
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