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>> Welcome to the future.
You're looking at what's perhaps the most influential piece
of architecture never built. Only a portion of Habitat 67
was ever completed.
What stands in Montreal today is a brutalist icon that dramatically
rethought the way we could live.
What could have been is a sprawling mega-development that
would have been home to thousands.
Architectural visualization company Neoscape teamed up with Moshe Safdie
to realize his vision in a stunningly detailed digital model powered
by Unreal Engine.
In the 1960s, Safdie asked, "What if?"
Here, more than 50 years later, it's finally answered.
It's safe to say that Safdie had grand ambitions when
it came to Habitat 67.
At just 23 years old, he submitted the designs
he came up with as an architecture student
to the Montreal World's Fair.
And in a shock move, they decided to actually build them.
Made from prefabricated modular units and assembled like LEGO bricks,
he wanted to create an entire city with shops, a hotel, office
and commercial space, and houses.
But when he was unable to secure the $45 million
in funding needed to complete his vision,
Safdie had to settle for less.
On just $15 million, he built a scaled-down version.
MOSHE SAFDIE: And so it's always been a question
in my mind, what would it be like if we really had those $45 million?
How would it have been as a community?
Are there hidden issues that we didn't realize?
Would you feel overwhelmed by the scale, or would it be intimate?
I didn't know that.
And so this massive exercise of digitizing it
into artificial reality, so to speak, is very educational and informative
for the architectural team.
>> But Habitat left its mark.
While it may have failed to spark the architectural revolution it sought
to create, today's designers and engineers
have nevertheless been inspired by Safdie's daring vision.
RYAN COHEN: When Epic came to us with the challenge of bringing Habitat
67 to life, we were super excited.
It was a project that is important in the architectural world.
Being able to give back to him as well as the architectural community
and, at the same time, partner with Epic
and explore how to use Unreal Engine 5 to kind of support
the traditional architectural visualization process
was super exciting to us.
So we jumped right in.
>> Neoscape had worked with Safdie before and were approached by Epic
Games to use their Unreal Engine software to bring the full vision
for Habitat 67 to life.
It was to be a Herculean task.
Before any work could begin on modeling the unfinished aspects
of Habitat, what was already built in Montreal had to be mapped.
To do this, a drone equipped with a camera and LiDAR,
a remote-sensing method that uses light in the form of a pulsed laser
to measure distances, flew preprogrammed flight paths
around the building, taking 207 scans,
while a second drone captured more than 4,000
traditional high-resolution images.
These three data sets were then combined, aligned,
and processed by Epic using their RealityCapture software.
Not only did this help create an incredibly accurate and detailed
model of Habitat 67 from which Neoscape could begin the next stage,
it was also an opportunity to preserve the state of the structure
as it is right now for historical reasons.
The model they created would also allow students of architecture
to explore habitats from anywhere in the world.
Next, Safdie Studio reached out to McGill University,
which holds all the original drawings and physical models in their Habitat
67 archive.
They spent several months digitizing the design
and further developing it, as this new model would need far more detail
than the original designs.
Special attention had to be paid to how the hotel would connect
with parking, how the water features and gardens would function,
and where the pedestrians and vehicle connections would be.
What was designed back in 1961 was just a concept.
Now it had to be real.
RYAN COHEN: We're there every step of the way
to kind of help them visualize that.
We were really partnering with them on the process.
It was a design that was worked on 50-plus years ago,
and he was kind of the designer as well as the client, in a way.
JERRY CHEN: It was daunting at first.
But it was also really exciting to work
on something that is identified as an iconic landmark in history.
>> The scale of this project was perhaps the greatest challenge
for Neoscape.
Creating a project of this size at this fidelity with new tools
required a different approach.
They focused on using the tools and assets available to them
from Epic Games without much customization.
They wanted to prove that projects like this
can be achieved by most professionals in the industry.
Neoscape simply wouldn't have been able to create this model
without Epic Games' Unreal Engine.
JERRY CHEN: I think the biggest thing is certainly not
having to click a Render button to see what you did,
being able to do things on the fly.
So we're able to really focus on the artistry, as opposed
to having to focus on how we can get there.
RYAN COHEN: We came up with a creative treatment
that was very ambitious.
We wanted to really test the tool and really push
the envelope on what a traditional architectural visualization
film feels like.
CARLOS CRISTERNA: We knew that it was going to be a lot of geometry.
There's thousands of residential units, office buildings, hotel,
school, museum.
It's a mixed-use development.
It's huge.
It's an island.
You see the city of Montréal in the distance.
All of that is very difficult to render
in real time in any other offline rendering package.
That was really the technical boundary that existed,
which was that friction that didn't allow the designer to do their job
and didn't allow the artist to do their job well.
On the surface, it may seem simple, but Unreal Engine
is allowing, with these new technologies,
to reduce that friction and make the process more enjoyable for everyone.
>> The modular nature of Habitat 67 lent itself to easier and faster
construction practices.
This was true in the digital world as well.
Elements of the design were, in effect,
copied and pasted several times over, just
like the modular units in real life.
The model was imported into Unreal Engine using
a data importer called Datasmith.
The model was created using Rhino and 3ds Max with basic materials.
To improve performance, the thousands of windows, vegetation,
set dressing, and vehicles were efficiently
grouped to limit the number of draw calls in the engine.
For lighting, a plugin called Sun and Sky
was used, along with a custom volumetric cloud
shader and atmospheric height fog.
This was designed to be easy to adjust without requiring programming
or game development experience.
Trees, plants, and set dressing were selected
to be diverse but not overwhelming.
And a discrete collection was used throughout the scene
to achieve a realistic look without compromising performance.
Traditional architectural visualization processes
are slow and can be frustrating for the designer and artists,
as making adjustments during the production process is not trivial.
Unreal Engine 5 helps reduce this friction
by allowing the artist and designer to work closely together.
With real-time rendering, all those involved
could collaborate closer and make decisions together.
The day finally came for Safdie to see the renderings,
to see his 50-year-old career-igniting projects brought
to digital life.
MOSHE SAFDIE: It was an immediate reaction:
I would love to live there.
And that's the ultimate test.
I mean, I would love to live there.
And yet, at the same time, I realized, boy,
was that ahead of its time.
It's ahead of its time today.
>> Unreal Engine is much more than just a tool for architects.
It can open up whole new worlds and whole new ideas.
That's exactly what we need now to rethink
how our cities should be made.
MOSHE SAFDIE: And I hope that actually making this accessible
to the public at large as an image, as an idea--you could live like
that--would now help advance people's desire to have this realized.
CARLOS CRISTERNA: We also want to encourage
people to take those pieces and come up with their own ideas,
come up with their own habitats, play with it and have fun with it,
learn from it.
And make your own movies.
Make your own still renderings.
Practice your craft.
MOSHE SAFDIE: Both to the student of architecture
and the student of life, I hope that this presentation, the tools
of that presentation, would allow you to take what we imagined and evolved
over the years and explore it in a personal way
further and imagine your own environments.
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>> This is Hillside, the recreation of the original vision for Habitat
67 in Unreal Engine, completing one of the most important building ideas
of the 20th century, here to inspire and enable the next generation
of architects for years to come.
You can get hands-on with the model at unrealengine.com
or explore more content and webinars, and hear directly from Neoscape
on the building of Hillside now.
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