At the end of September I was invited to attend Unreal Engine’s annual conference for Architecture, Unreal Build: 19, held at the prestigious RIBA headquarters in London. This was a fantastic opportunity to not only see how this piece of software is being developed, but to also find out how some of the leading visualisation studios and architectural practices in the country are integrating Unreal Engine into their design workflows.
For the uninitiated, Unreal Engine is a game engine developed by Epic Games, the people responsible for the hit game, Fortnite. The tools available in the software allow for the creation of fully interactive worlds that can be rendered in real time and to a photo-realistic quality. In recent years there has been a huge uptake in people using Unreal Engine for Architectural Visualisation and Epic Games has now started developing its software specifically for the ArchViz industry.
The presentations that were given were really inspiring and the standard of work on display was excellent. The projects that were showcased ranged from the creation of a “digital twin” of the entire city of Gothenburg, re-created down to the finest details, to VR safety simulations for construction sites. A running theme throughout most of the presentations was the idea of “the user experience” and how people perceive a space from a real world scale and perspective as well as from an all-encompassing overview of a project, where huge amounts of data can be contained within one model.
I look forward to seeing how this software develops in the future and how we can implement its use in our own workflow here at Pearce Bottomley Architects. Hopefully I’ll be invited back next year!