Archviz Journey with Unreal Engine

Hotel Aethos Ericeira

Hotel Aethos in Ericeira Portugal is a real hotel build by Pedra Silva Arquitectos. I found the space very beautiful, so beautiful that I wanted to recreate it in Unreal Engine as a practicing exercise to get familiar with the lumen system and the path tracer. Modeling was done in rhino and then simply imported to unreal engine via datasmith. 

Here are some of the reference images I used to recreate the space, I tried to be as exact as possible when modeling the space and I tried to catch the same kind of vibe with the lighting.

Villa 01

This is another personal project I did in my freetime, this time designed by myself. Again, mixing between real time lumen and nanite, and the path tracer. I really enjoy the flexibility unreal engine gives me because for some shots you do not need the quality of the path tracer, lumen is plenty enough and can handle some scenes like the exterior like a champ (this also helps with render times).

Even though I deisgned this building myself I did use midjourney as a tool in the conceptual phase of this project. AI is everywhere these days and it is steadily creeping into this industry and I do not want to be left in the dust when it comes to this technology. Although some of the images are still janky and at closer inspection the buildings dont work at all, it is still a fantastic brainstorming tool and it helped me create a mood board for this project quickly. Usually when you start a project you already kind of have an idea of what you want or what vibe you want to produce, the next step is usually going to google or pinterest to find something alligned with whats in your head. This can leads to sub-par reference. I find it extremely useful that I can give midjourney a specific prompt in my own words, with my own description and it spits out something according to that description. This is great both for inspiration and as a starting point for the project. After I gathered my inspiration i then went into rhino and modeled a building that was cohesive and had a proper floor plan that was working. 

Here you can see some of the reference images I gathered from midjourney for this project: 

Furniture

Here I tried to focus on a smaller scene where I could put emphasis on the furniture and try to add as many details as possible.

Ski Cabin 

These are renderings I made in my freetime for an architecture competition for a ski hut in iceland. First off, VERY intimidating setting, I had never done snow before and I was very nervous to see how it would turn out. For me it was also very important to capture the icelandic landscape, and it was my first time doing real environmental artwork. To capture the landscape accurately I used DEM data that I found for iceland and through programs like microdem I was able to extract height data from the DEM files which can then be loaded into gaea to produce accurate geographical locations. The reference was very important in this as I was constantly just trying to match that vibe. I am also starting to inccorporate post production more in my work, and resisting the urge to do everything in 3D (at least for stills). Photoshop is extremely powerful and a huge time saver when used correctly and at the start of the project I really tried to lay out the things that I would do in unreal engine and the things I would do in post in photoshop.

Raw unreal render vs post in photoshop:

Here is the reference for the environment:

Another neat trick I used Midjourney for in this project was the smoke element in the exterior shots to be added in post. Finding things like residential chimney smoke at a good resolution with a background that can be easily removed without much light pollution is really hard to find. Instead of spending hours on google I can just type into midjourney "give me chimney smoke against a black background" and voila, easy peasy.

Drone Tracking Case Study

This was a case study where I tried learning the workflow of tracking a drone shot and placing an architectural project into it at the correct scale. For the tracking I used PFtrack, imported the tracked camera into blender where I had a correctly scaled model from google earth using the blosm plugin, and then I exported the camera and the google earth model to unreal. Edited the video footage in davinci where I also masked out some of the foreground elements, it is definitely not perfect and I could have rendered the whole thing with more samples to get a cleaner look, but as a proof of concept I think it does the job.

Le Corbusier Frankenstein

One of the big advantages of unreal engine is the fact that it is a game engine. I think that in the future this industry will demand more and more interactive experiences/models. This project was not meant to be a beautiful rendering but rather a case study exploring the interactive capabilites of unreal engine. I took the famous Domino project from Le Corbusier and made a little game where you can alter different elements in the scene in a humorous way. This can easily be applied to any projects. 

We can change the material of surfaces, switch objects, switch between first person mode and an orbiting camera, an interactive pointer, and being able to change the sun angle.

BUNT Studio

If you have made it this far I want to thank you for taking the time, I hope you enjoyed some of the things I had to show. Moving forward this year I would like to start producing more professional work and since January I began working on my own brand/studio, BUNT, and managed to launch a website. 

I hope to work with architects, other archviz studios in the industry, and collaborate with people from all walks of life. I really enjoy this work and the never ending learning aspect that surrounds it. Below is a reel I made for this brand and if you would like to check out more of my work, you can find it at the link below.

https://www.buntstudio.eu/