Computer-aided design (CAD) has doubtless revolutionized the design and engineering fields, replacing paper and pencil drawings with detailed 3D models. Recent news of Epic Games’ release of Unreal Studio promises yet another dimensional leap in the way that engineering projects are designed and created by introducing the concept of real-time rendering to the workflow.
Real-time rendering has demonstrated the ability to create engaging, dynamic experiences across a wide variety of platforms, including virtual reality. Until recently, however, these experiences have been primarily limited to video games, rather than professional CAD applications. Though possible, the process required to export CAD designs into software like Unreal Engine was an arduous one, which is why Unreal Studio may be, if you’ll excuse the pun, a game changer.
Real-Time Rendering Grows Up
Those who remember the early days of real-time 3D rendering will recall the chunky and choppy graphics associated with it. The 1980 game Battlezone featured green wire frame models of tanks that seemed so impressive at the time that the U.S. Army used it to train its tank gunners. The technology has advanced so far since then that it’s almost impossible to distinguish a game like Call of Duty from the real world.
Game engine technology has advanced to the point where the quality of real-time rendering rivals that of traditional render engines. The next natural step was for visualization professionals to start using real-time rendering for presentation, collaboration and other activities that weren’t possible when renderings used to take hours, days or even weeks to complete.
In workflows that have always used traditional rendering processes, such as animated TV series, architectural visualization, and even engineering visualization, real-time rendering can take the place of traditional render engines and speed up the development of stills, presentation videos, 360-degree videos, interactive fly-throughs, and other presentation materials by 100x or more.
Real-time rendering is making its way into civil, mechanical and electrical engineering, as well. In the civil space, a team of artists from urban planning consultancy vrbn.io recently tried out real-time rendering with a dense urban model created in CityEngine urban planning software.
Using Unreal Studio, the CityEngine model was imported into Unreal Engine with automatic optimizations to make real-time playback possible. Users could then navigate and explore the neighborhood in real time. The result was a stunning presentation of an urban environment complete with dense foliage, streets and walkways, and a complex array of unique buildings.
A recent survey by CGarchitect suggests that, as an increasing number of non-gaming firms experiment with real-time rendering, Unreal Engine is the most popular game engine used for non-game applications. The percentage of visualization professionals using Unreal Engine has doubled in the past year, and more users (40.8 percent) are experimenting with Unreal Engine than with any traditional render engine on the market.
Given the potential for collaboration and engagement in a video game-like environment, these results aren’t surprising, but importing CAD data into a real-time rendering platform isn’t easy and requires a great deal of manual intervention to ensure that data isn’t lost in the process. Seeing this trend, it’s also not surprising that Epic Games developed a method for making the translation process a simple one.
Introducing Unreal Studio
Unreal Studio is a suite of tools and materials designed especially for non-game users of Unreal Engine.
Unreal Studio includes:
● Datasmith—A suite of export/import plug-ins for a number of apps to Unreal Engine
● Learning Tools—Tutorials that include Unreal Engine fundamentals and industry-focused training materials and regular content updates
● Assets—100 Substances from Allegorithmic for common architecture and design materials, and industry-specific templates to quickly create immersive design experiences
● Support—A monitored community-driven discussion board and one-to-one ticketed support
At the heart of Unreal Studio is the Datasmith toolkit. As a central component of the package, the toolkit simplifies and speeds up the process of importing CAD data into Unreal Engine in a nondestructive way. The Datasmith toolkit transfers CAD data from over 20 CAD sources, including Autodesk 3ds Max, into Unreal Engine.
Unreal Studio tackles common problems in the CAD data pipeline, including conforming assets to match a real-time engine’s capabilities, retaining scene hierarchy and metadata for working with assets in-engine, and optimizing the scene to match target platforms and create interactive visualizations.
The rise of real-time rendering associated with the beta release of Unreal Studio coincides with another visualization trend currently affecting designers and engineers across a number of large companies: virtual reality.
A New Era of Design Visualization
Now that virtual reality has entered a new phase of high-definition graphics, greater portability and greatly reduced price, an increasing number of firms are relying on the technology for internal engineering and design purposes. As you’d expect from an often gaming-centered tech, VR relies on real-time rendering for immersive experiences.
An indicator of the increased reliance on real-time rendering and VR in the design process is the fact that designers from major automotive companies like Audi, McLaren and Ferrari converged in Munich, Germany, to talk about the improvements real-time rendering can bring to their design processes, including VR.
One emerging way to use VR is for remote collaboration, where engineers meet in virtual reality to discuss, propose, suggest and redesign products. NVIDIA recently announced its Holodeck system, a hardware/software suite for just this purpose. Users include automotive designers as well as architects and scientists. The Holodeck uses a custom version of Unreal Engine to drive its real-time graphics.
BMW has kitted out VR workstations where designers can try out a design virtually before committing to it in practice. Using a VR headset, designers can interact with the dashboard and see a virtual environment that updates in real time, courtesy of Unreal Engine. It’s only a matter of time before this technology makes its way into the vehicle showroom, where we’ll expect to take a photoreal test-drive without leaving the building.
NASA even uses virtual reality to train astronauts before sending them out to the International Space Station. Training within VR helps NASA overcome some of the limitations inherent in training on Earth.
Previously, porting company CAD data over to a VR platform would have proven difficult; however, tools like Unreal Engine can produce real-time, stereoscopic images for a number of commercially available VR headsets quite easily. The introduction of Unreal Studio streamlines the process further by making it possible to easily bring CAD data into Unreal Engine to create VR experiences.
As engineers and designers abandoned pencil and paper for CAD, they may also increasingly adopt real-time rendering—not only for more dynamic presentations, but also to create VR experiences. This will, in part, be facilitated by tools like Unreal Studio that make this process easier than ever possible before.
Unreal Studio is currently in free beta, so that you can try the software now and better understand just how it might be used to make your projects more dynamic and even completely immersive.
Epic Games has sponsored this post. They have no editorial input to this post. Unless otherwise stated, all opinions are mine. —Michael Molitch-Hou