Five examples of how AEC companies are using Unreal Engine to give customers more control.
Epic Games has sponsored this post.
How do you construct a building without material? How do you decorate a room without walls? How do you take in a view that doesn’t exist?
Virtually, of course. The built world no longer needs to be built to be experienced. With 3D visualization tools, digital buildings can be designed, displayed and configured in real time, in photorealistic detail. You can take a tour of your home, condo or building before a single shovel breaks ground. You can even adjust flooring, appliances, colors, lighting, exterior views and the weather with real-time configuration tools.
In this article, we’ll take a look at several such tools that have been developed in Unreal Engine, a real-time 3D platform from developer Epic Games.
“Sales configuration is the idea that you create this virtual representation of a project before it’s built, and give customers the experience of making their own design decisions in a high-fidelity, interactive world,” explained Ken Pimentel, architecture industry manager at Epic Games. “Imagine this is a time machine. It’s your portal into the future, and it’s done with enough realism that you can make a purchasing decision.”
Real Estate Configuration in a Blink
During its recent Build: Architecture 2021 event, Epic Games showcased many of its AEC partners and the projects they have created in Unreal Engine. One interesting case study came from digital design studio Pureblink, a specialist in real estate visualization. Pureblink was tasked with developing a configurator for Galleria III, an upcoming 21,000 square foot condo tower in Toronto, Canada.
Overview of the Galleria III configurator. (Video courtesy of Pureblink.)
“One of the key challenges that we had with this particular project was the fact that it is located in a very industrial area,” explained Jose Uribe, founder and creative director at Pureblink. “For the typical prospect buyer, it would be very difficult to really understand and visualize and experience what this master plan community is going to be like 10 years from now once everything is built.”
Uribe and his team solved that problem with Unreal Engine, using the real-time 3D platform to build an interactive application for prospective Gallerians to visualize exactly what their future condo would look like. The application was tailored to run on large touchscreens in the Galleria presentation center as well as in users’ web browsers, accommodating restrictions imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic.
With the configurator, future habitants can browse available units, visualize floors and floor plans, see inside the unit and out—all in realistic detail. It’s the realism that really sells it. Lighting, for instance, can make all the difference between a virtual condo that feels warm and inviting and one that fails to impress. Pureblink paid careful attention to lighting in its Galleria project, and credited Unreal Engine with enabling that creativity.
“Lighting is one of the most important components [of Unreal Engine],” extolled Uribe. “Having a tool that allows us to play with lighting—having practical lighting, natural lighting, diffuse lighting, ambient lighting… and trying it out in real-time, it’s completely priceless.”
The latest incarnation of the real-time 3D platform, Unreal Engine 5 (currently in early access), takes lighting even further. The release introduced Lumen, a new solution for global illumination capable of adapting indirect lighting on the fly. To those not in the know, this is a lot more impressive than it sounds.
“Global illumination is the hardest problem to solve in computer graphics,” Pimentel claimed. “It’s the soft bounce of light everywhere in the scene. And everyone struggled do it in real-time—until Unreal Engine 5 and Lumen showed up.”
It is all part of Epic Games’ effort to deliver perfect pixels of visualization that is so true-to-life it might as well be a photograph. In Pimentel’s view, Unreal Engine is closer to this goal than any of its competitors.
“When it comes to achieving the fastest real-time photorealism, Lumen really sets us apart,” he said.
Pureblink would seem to agree. “Right now, we’re extremely excited about Unreal and all the new features we’ve been testing heavily,” Uribe said. “Lumen, raytracing, global illumination, path tracing… it’s absolutely amazing what you can do with it.”
Build Your House and Buy It
Configurators are not just for condo towers. Italian company Zuru Tech aims to bring the technology to houses with its Zuru Home app, currently in development.
If you’ve played The Sims, you already know how the Zuru Home app works. It is like a video game where users can design and configure an entire house from a library of components, including furniture and appliances. The app is being developed in Unreal Engine, and it makes use of real-time raytracing to provide users with a photorealistic look at their home.
And here’s the fun part: once users are satisfied with their design, they don’t simply turn off the game and go outside. They click a button to buy the house they just built—and three months later, they can live in it.
“The house will arrive in kit form from a factory, and you’ll have your house,” Pimentel said. “[Zuru Tech] is using Unreal Engine to turn the power of design over to the user.”
The Zuru Home app, currently under development. (Video courtesy of Zuru Tech.)
Zaha Hadid Architects is doing something similar for a real estate development project called Beyabu on the Honduran island of Roatán. Potential Beyabu residents can use a configurator built on Unreal Engine to select their desired unit, check out the view and personalize their residence.
“The Beyabu residential configurator is the latest build in a lineage of residential platforms developed at Zaha Hadid Architects with Epic [Games] in Unreal Engine,” commented Henry Louth, Associate at Zaha Hadid Architects. “[It] offer[s] investors, occupiers and developers ways to configure properties to suit individual preferences, offering [the] ability to position units, configure add-ons to the envelope and customize the interior space layout and fittings.”
Adding the Human Touch
Real estate configurators do not stop being relevant once a property is built. Design company Noel + Marquet used Unreal Engine to develop a browser-based configurator for interior design. Users can adjust flooring, wall and ceiling colors, wallpapers and more, seeing their changes reflected in real-time in photorealistic detail.
The Noel + Marquet app uses pixel streaming, which enables high fidelity graphics without the need for high-end hardware on the user side.
“Anybody on a browser can go in and start making these changes and deciding what it should look like. It’s very simple to use,” praised Pimentel.
Sometimes, though, you want a professional there with you. Perhaps a sales adviser to guide you through a property. This, too, can be accomplished virtually—but less virtually than you might think.
Spanish developer AEDAS Homes is embracing a human connection in its virtual building tours with a platform called Live Virtual Homes. Mashing up the domains of BIM and M&E, AEDAS inserts a live sales adviser into a 3D model of its properties. The sales adviser, on camera in front of a green screen, connects live with a client to guide them through a home and answer any questions.
“The advisor is realistically integrated in the 3D model, which has never been seen before in the property development sector,” said José Luis Leirós, CEO at Live Virtual Homes. “And you do not need to install any software, use VR glasses or learn how to move in a 3D environment. You just open a link on your mobile, iPad or computer, and you’re all set.”
“Unreal Engine is the backbone of [our platform],” Leirós continued. “Bringing our homes to clients that are miles away would not be possible without the real-time rendering capabilities of this software.”
Straight From Design to Selling
We have seen five interesting applications of real-time real estate visualization, and there are many more we left out. This technology is rapidly sweeping across the AEC industry, and not just because customers think it’s cool. Real estate configurators offer a very direct boost to a developer’s bottom line.
“It’s very expensive and difficult to physically have a sales example of every option in an apartment or home. If you can instead replace that with a virtual experience that is instantly updateable, you have saved yourself a ton of money and time,” summarized Pimentel. “You can basically go straight from design to selling. You don’t even have to build a physical mock-up. There’s high ROI there.”
To learn more about using Unreal Engine for real estate configurators, visit unrealengine.com.
