Converted - Boston's Charles Street Jail [Realtime]

Challenges Converted
#1

Greetings, peeps. It would appear I am a month late into the party, but I look forward to partaking this challenge nonetheless.

  • Category: Realtime
  • Building: Charles Street Jail in Boston
  • Location: Boston, along Charles River
  • Time Period: 1850s - 1940s
  • Current Conversion State: The Liberty Hotel
  • Alternate Conversion Ideas: Still up in the air, but thinking of a library or botanic garden
  • Reference: Previous condition on the left; Current condition on the right

BeforeAfterBoard
BeforeAfterBoard1428×1813 536 KB

The main goal of this challenge is to get more efficient at using UE and improve my current workflow for assets creation for visualization. I probably won’t be able to get it finished to the level I’d like given my late start and limited timeframe, but I will give it my best effort regardless.

Given this is a self-imposed decision to proceed under the real-time category, I have chosen a project that is more feasible, grounded in real life, and self-contained. Several challenges were identified during the exploration phase in choosing the type of conversion due to the open-ended-ness of the subjects. Eventually, the Boston’s Charles Street Jail is the particular building I settled on that would enable me to tackles those challenges head-on without getting burnt out through the production.

Once again, thanks Ronen and the sponsors for the challenge and hope to get to see other awesome entries from you guys :smile:

1 Like
#2

@Ronen - how would you suggest we showcase the realtime environment for the final? Would you prefer still frames, screenshots, or even a movie?

#3

Welcome to CONVERTED @simplychen

For the final a pre-recorded animation for sure. I will post more about how to deliver the REAL-TIME entries in a week or two.

#4

Awesome, thanks for the heads up!

#5

Really interesting building. Looking forward to seeing your UE work. I was also considering the realtime route, but never having used it was concerned about trying to do too much on this project! - is it a steep learning curve? Best of luck!

#6

@Flowstorm UE provides multitudes of features and contains technical aspects that makes the medium daunting to pick up; however, I think most of the basic process for archviz is more or less straight forward and somewhat well-documented.

The largest stumbling block we tend to overlook as ‘traiditional’ archviz artists who’s used to using offline renderers is the process of optimizing your assets/scenes. Therefore, knowing some game development and the process it entails would help you stay efficient when working in your scenes. Sites like Polycount, Flipped Normals, 80 level, and Unreal Online Learning are great ways to start learning the pipeline and jargons.

Since the introduction of Datasmith, Epic has been expanding and streamlining the export/import process from whichever DCC program of your choosing. But up to this point, my experience tends to end up working with models provided by clients which aren’t at all suitable for straight import and/or can get messy to optimize with each design changes.

Hence, I’d like to explore the way an environment artists would in a game dev pipeline, e.g. baking hero objects from high poly to low poly, using trimsheets, atlas, etc. This is the time consuming part, but I think it’s worth knowing if you plan to leverage the game engine for realtime needs. I may not nail every single thing, but hey, might as well use this opportunity to learn. So I am not at all concerned about placing at all.

1 Like
#7

@simplychen Thanks for your thorough reply, that’s really helpful. Interesting you mention the stage of model optimizing in the process of using UE. I have a similar experience of having to ‘clean up’ client models to prepare them for rendering - especially Revit files which can be a nightmare. I’ll hopefully have a look at Datasmith at some point and see how it deals with Revit files - if it has any special cleanup tools. I can see that preparing models for realtime use is another workstage in itself. Good luck