Real time VR work from Line Creative – remarkable photo realism in a VR environment
Epic Games has launched Unreal Studio as an open beta with the goal of providing customers in architecture, design and manufacturing a shortcut to producing high-quality, real-time, fully immersive visual experiences.
While the company has had Datasmith out there for a while to assist with data translation from your workhorse design system to the VR world (which requires much lightweight data), this new offering expands around it and brings a more complete workflow to the market. So let’s see what it includes.
Datasmith: This is used to efficiently transfer CAD data from over 20 CAD sources into Unreal Engine.
Learning Tools: Extensive tutorials include Unreal Engine fundamentals and industry-focused training materials, with updated content released on an ongoing basis.
Assets: Unreal Studio includes 100 Substances from Allegorithmic (allegorithmic.com) for common architecture and design materials, and industry-specific templates to quickly create experiences.
Support: This is perhaps the big one for those looking to such systems to home brew their own VR experiences. The beta features a monitored community-driven discussion board and one-to-one ticketed support.
“The Unreal Studio open beta builds on the success of our Datasmith release. Datasmith simplifies bringing Unreal Engine into architecture and design pipelines with automatic lightmap and UV creation along with scripted workflows to organize, optimize and clean up geometry,” said Marc Petit, General Manager of Unreal Enterprise at Epic Games. “The feedback has been overwhelming—in just five months we had over 14,000 beta registrations, and a recent beta survey reported Datasmith productivity gains of 113 percent. We’re taking all the ‘boring’ work out of the process and giving users more time to be creative.”
If you want to see what can be done, there’s an interesting video from visualisation legends, Burrows.
And there’s also this rather remarkable work from Line Creative, covered by DEVELOP3D’s sister publication, AEC Magazine.
For more information, visit wwww.unrealengine.com/en-US/studio
