This is a public community guide to using Unreal Engine 4 for

architectural visualization.
Last updated : April 6th 2015
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Below is the table of contents. Right click then click on the link to jump to a
specific chapter. Please don't edit this section.
Preparing content for UE4
Models - 3ds MAX
3d Meshes
Polygon optimization
Migrating from Vray
UV Mapping
Light Mapping
Collision
LOD
FBX export
Blender workflow
Vegetation - SpeedTree
Landscape Generation
Natural
Urban
Esri CityEngine
Ghost Town 3ds Max Script
3d People
(What other software do you use?)
UE4
Fbx Importing
Materials
General
Painting
Map Generators - crazybump, Shadermap 2, Bitmap2material, Genetica
Substance
Quixel Suite
Vegetation
Importing SpeedTree
Grass
Lighting - static
Lighting - dynamic
Matinee and Recording
Interactivity
Lights
Other subjects??
Collaborative Workflow

I.

Preparing content for UE4

A. Models - 3ds MAX
1. 3d Meshes

Unreals default unit is 1 cm, so match 3ds Max units to that.

Use meshes with a relatively low polycount, but not as low as in video games since the goal is high
quality archviz. High poly meshes can kill your framerate.
Organize meshes in 2 groups:
The architectural meshes, used only once throughout the scene (the architectural assets, the
landscape and the streets etc), all have their pivot at the same location, at 0,0,0 world
coordinates for faster importing and positioning. You can divide some of the meshes up in
multiple elements for better light build results. (ex. the walls consist of separate meshes on
each side of the building)

The props (candles, books, pillows, benches etc) - used more than once, each have a local
pivot, at their lowest point on the z axis.

Pivot can also be set up using the options of one of the batch exporters - see
9. FBX Export

2. Polygon optimization
Reducing poly count is essential for UE. It is also important when working with your 3d library that is
produced for the standard rendering industry.
3ds Max has 3 basic modifiers for this: Multires, Optimize, ProOptimizer
This process can be tricky for more complex objects such as a car where some objects are more
detailed than others. In this case you will need to take individual parts and optimise them. Do not
forget to check protect UV option when optimizing.

3. Migrating from Vray

This topic seeks to offer tips and tricks on how to make this process fast and easy. The main idea is
that you have to open a vray object, convert all materials to standard materials with all textures in
place, and optimize the mesh without ripping the UVs.
Bellow is a test using this scene convert script:
AK-VRmtl to standard.ms
As you can see the script maintained only the diffuse maps. You will have to place all the other maps
manually in UE4.

4. UV Mapping
UV mapping on channel 1. We used custom UV only on important meshes such as the main walls and
floors, where the final output needed to match the original building precisely. On all other meshes
we applied a standard UVW mapping of 100x100x100cm. We recommend doing UVW on all objects,
you may never know when a map will be applied in UE.
On objects with more materials use Default 3ds max Multi/Sub Object. For a good fbx export, all
materials should be standard 3ds Max (no vray, etc.). UE will also recognise if you use a diffuse map.

5. Light Mapping
This process is really time consuming. It is required for Light Baking in UE4. We really hope that in the
future the engine will be fully dynamic and light baking will be a thing of the past. The current fully
dynamic feature, LPV (light propagation volumes) yields mediocre results.
On texture channel 2 of each object make a new uv mapping in which all polygons are placed within
the one unit square of the uv space. For quicker results use Unwrap UVW modifier with default
flatten mapping (This is not the best result method)

*UE docs:
More details on
Lightmapping
A great video tutorial for an initial understanding of this concept can be seen
here
.

6. Collision
All meshes used in games must have collision geometry, otherwise you could walk through walls.
Same goes for archviz navigation.
*UE4 docs:
Collision documentation
Unreal can generate few types of collision geometry based on the mesh geometry. However, if the 3d
meshes are very complex this can add up and cost you a lot of resources which translate to lower
frame rates. Its best to have most of the collision made of simple boxes in 3dsMax. And remember,
objectA must have a collision mesh with the name UCX_objectA with the pivot point in the same
place.

7. LOD
In video games this is very important. LOD defines how detailed objects are rendered at certain
distances, so that the GPU makes better use of resources. We skipped LOD creation for now, and this
may have lowered our final frame rate. Well experiment more with LODs in the future, in the
meantime help us expand this section!
*UE4 docs:
More on LODs

8. FBX export
Try one of these scripts to help you export your assets
FBX to UE4 Batch Exporter 1.1
TS_UE4FbxExporter
Let us know if you use other scripts and tell us about the workflow!

9. Blender workflow
There is a guide detailing the Blender - UE4 pipeline
here
on the unreal wiki.

B. Vegetation - SpeedTree
Up to now SpeedTree has the best integration for vegetation in UE4. Keep in mind that all trees have
Lightmaps, Wind and Ambient Occlusion.
Unfortunately you cannot use the standard SpeedTree library because those models don't have with
light maps for UE4.
Try to learn from
Maico Girardi
, he has great tutorials.
Also see
Maico Girardis ST grass
. (for UE4 grass please check the UE vegetation section below)

C. Landscape Generation
1. Natural
2. Urban
a) Esri CityEngine
b) Ghost Town 3ds Max Script

D. 3d People
E. (What other software do you use?)

II.

UE4
A. Fbx Importing

Once you are done exporting, run UE4 and start setting up. Start a new project and pick the blueprint
first person template. For optimal quality and starter content, settings should be like in the pic
below. Dont forget to specify the location, otherwise it will be stored on your windows partition, and
projects can pile up pretty fast and eat up your HDD storage space which is annoying if you are using
a SSD.

The Unreal YouTube Channel has lots of good tutorials

here
, watch as many as you can !
Its important to read all the pop-ups related to the UI to get your bearing. One important
thing to remember, your project can have multiple maps, and the content browser to the left displays
the assets shared by all the maps in the current project. If you delete an asset in the content browser
it will be removed from all of your maps, so careful with that! We found out the hard way
FBX importing is as simple as dragging and dropping the FBX files in the content browser with
standard settings, except the combine meshes option. Keep that off.

Lightmap UVs should be generated externally, auto-generation is still not good enough.
Maybe they will improve on this in future updates. Collision will use mesh geometry if checked; not a
good choice for high poly meshes. Importing materials can be useful if you dont want to bother
replacing them (not recommended, UE4s physically based shaders are great), or if you want to
replace them and identify them more easily on a mesh with a lot of material ids. This is what i did for
vehicles.
Next step is to drag and drop meshes from the content browser, into the scene (map). They
are added to the scene outliner on the top right as you do that, and you can edit details in the lower
right pane. This is where the location coordinates can be edited. As i mentioned earlier, we set the
pivot point at 0,0,0 coordinates in MAX, then set the same coordinates here in UE4. This is how we
imported and positioned all the architectural assets in one move.

Props are imported pretty much the same way, except you have to position them manually,
one by one.

B. Materials
1. General
This is when you start creating some simple materials and lights to get a basic idea on how it
will look. You can find video tutorials for materials
here
, and more info
here.
Material creation is a 3 step process:
First
, google seamless images of what you need and apply a high resolution filter (ex.
wooden floor seamless texture). Its recommended for the texture dimensions need to be a power
of 2, so go for 512x512, 1024x1024, 2048x2048, or 4096x4096.

If the texture you like isn't seamless or a power of 2, then proceed to

step 2:
Photoshop editing - image resize or a bit of custom dimension cropping will get you the right
proportions and size, and the offset filter + Healing brush will make it look seamless.
Click on offset then set both horizontal and vertical to half the size of the texture. That will
get the seams in the center of the image and make it easier to edit them out using the healing brush
tool.

This wood texture was 2000x2000, so we upscaled it to 2048x2048

2. Painting
3. Map Generators - crazybump, Shadermap 2, Bitmap2material, Genetica
Step 3 is creating the other texture maps using the original texture. We only created normal
maps and a few specular maps for this project.
There are several tools available for map creation, we tested
CrazyBump
and
Shadermap 2
,
they are both great. On the next project we are planning on testing out Allegorithmics
Bitmap2Material
,
AwesomeBump (
github link
), which is PBS ready, and Quixel Suites
NDO
.
Shadermap can export all maps with one click.
Genetica
is a great tool for creating tileable textures
based on photos but even better for generating procedural maps (biggest amount of noise types of
any program i know of).
Equalize Texture is a photoshop script that make texture flat from wrong
light.

After you are done with map creation get them in the content browser (UE4 only accepts only
certain
file types
) and create a basic material. Connect the new texture maps to their respective material
parameters (diffuse map to base color, normal map to normal, specular map to specular). Alter other
material parameters like roughness and opacity to suit your needs and you have your basic material
ready. For more advanced materials use epics tutorials.
A basic material only needs diffuse and normal maps and looks like this:

Quick shortcuts:
click while holding t : creates a texture node at that location using the currently selected
texture in the content browser. If you don't have a texture selected in the content browser
when doing this, you will get an error message at the bottom of the node like in the pic above
.
link
click while holding 1 : creates a constant at that location.
link
click while holding u : creates a Texture Coordinate expression at that location.
link
click while holding m : creates a Multiply expression at that location. l
ink

4. Substance
Here are some videos on how to make a material in Substance Designer for use in Unreal 4.
link
, link2

5. Quixel Suite
6. About PBR Materials
If you want to read a little bit more about how PBR (Physically Based Rendering) materials work, here
is one great article by Joe EarthQuake Wilson in Marmoset's website.
link
Also, Allegorithmic has two free for download books entitled "The comprehensive PBR guide" with
great explanations and tricks made by Wes McDermott.
link
And finally, a guide that Brian Yu (3py0n) has made with several articles about making PBR Materials.
link
.

C. Vegetation
1. Grass
Here is a great grass asset made by
Aaron Neal
. In the video comments you can find all the details for
making this grass and also the project with grass ready to use.

D. Lighting - static
Firstofallread
this
,
itsthedocumentationonglobalillumination.andalso
this
.
After you are done with imports and materials you can start experimenting with lighting.Dragand
dropadirectionallightfromthemodesareaintothescene.

In our case, while the church needed strong lighting (50 intensity, 15 indirect contribution), the
school needed a directional light with low intensity(7.5)and ahighindirectcontributionfactor(30).Thisis
because Tadao allowed just a touch of light to penetrate the church walls for that dramaticcrossshaped
light effect, while the school receives a bit more light. The pics below show just that (high exposure, the
realthingisdarker).

Altering the direction of the light could have resulted in a verydifferentlookbutwepreferredsomethinga

bitmorerealistic.

More info on directional lights can be found

here
. Since there is no formula for the perfect setup
and each scene has different lighting requirements, youll have to play around with the parameters and
findwhatsuitsyourneeds.


Modifiedsettingsaremarkedwithyellowarrows,everythingelseisstandard.

When we were done setting up the lighting we built the light by pushing the build button. You
should keep it on preview for a faster workflow until the scene is done then build it on highorproduction
quality.(youcanfindtheseoptionsinthedropdownmenuofthebuildbutton.)

After the light build was complete, we were looking totweakthelook ofthesceneevenfurther,so
we used the post processvolumesintheModes/Place/Visualtab.Wedraggedanddroppedthemintothe
scene, set the scale to encompass the room/ scene wewerelookingtoadjust,andstartedexperimenting
with the parameters. In my opinion, the ones with the biggest impact are GI and Depth of field.Consider

that using some of the post process effects can make your scene look better from an artistic standpoint,
buttheycandriveyouawayfromphotorealism.
The parameterswetweakedarecontrast,abitofvignette,bloom,GI,screenspacereflections,and
DOF.Therearenoformulashere,sotrythemout!
We left everything on the
world settings tab on default, as post process volumes gave us better
localcontrol.

E. Lighting - dynamic
F. Matinee and Recording
You can find everything you need to know about matinee in the documentation provided by
EPIC here:
userguide
,
howto
, and an
examplebreakdown
.
After you are done with the creation phase , you can record it using matinees tools, or you can
do it using external software like

fraps
.
In order to have a high frame rate you should record image sequences and then complete the
video in

adobeaftereffects
, add sound and other effects. If you want quick results then just use the
movie recorder in the engine. Recording the video with the engines tools can sometimes make the
video a bit laggy. you can see that in most UE4 videos online. Ive had better results using fraps. Just
make sure the viewport is fullscreen and you set the taskbar on autohide.

G. Interactivity
Lights
Heres a
quickvideo
uploaded by David Boura on how you can turn lights on and off by using a
keyboard key.

H. Other subjects??

III.

Collaborative Workflow

One of our goals was to use UE4 as a collaborative tool, so we experimented with Perforce,
GoogleDrive,andDropbox.
Perforce
isok,itsavesmultipleversionsoftheproject,sothatyouhaveaccesstotherevision
historyifyoumessup.Itoffersplentyofcontrol,butitshardtosetup.ItalsousesatonofHDDspaceto
storerevisions.Youcantuseittomakerealtimechangesandeverytimeyouwanttoworkonyour
projectyouhavetogothroughaprocessofcheckingoutandthencheckingin.Itstimeconsumingand
itsnotworthit,unlessyouhavealargeteamandneedmorecontrol.

I found that the best way to work in small teams is to use a cloud storage tool like
GoogleDrive/
Dropbox etc. Dropbox didn't offer enough storage space unless we bought a premium package, so we
went for GDrive. You simply share your project folder with your team and every time anyone makes a
change (and saves), the project is updated in the cloud. If you only want to add assets to the content
browser,youdontevenneedtoclosetheengine,itupdatesinrealtime.

UE4archvizguide
Since version 4 of the engine is not even a year old and updates and newfeatures arerollingout
regularly, I thought it would be a good idea to create a public UE4 archviz guide that everyone can
contribute to, so we can keep up with the updates and share the knowledge. The guide is a google
document that can be updated in real time, and that anyone can comment on, so help us fill the empty
sectionsandtellusaboutyourexperienceusingUE4forarchviz!