>> Thank you for coming.
Thank you Unreal and Epic for having us here.
My name is Carlos Cristerna I work at Neoscape.
At Neoscape, we do architectural visualization.
Architectural visualization, as you know,
is typically an offline rendering situation.
It takes a lot of time of computing power
and our clients really demand very high-quality visuals.
So, what I want to show you today
is a demo that we did in conjunction with Unreal,
Nvidia, and Lenovo, trying RTX; real-time ray tracing.
So we grabbed a dataset
that we used to have from a client of ours
that we have used to create the film, create renderings,
the whole thing in the offline world,
on a CPU render farm
and bring that into Unreal Engine through Datasmith
and see if we could break it and see what happens,
how far could we push the quality of the visuals
and can we tell the typical story
that we tell of the properties
that our clients either are constructing or own.
All right, so I'm going to hit play.
This is the actual working file and we'll see how that goes.
So, this is 425 Park Avenue in New York City
it's a Norman Foster building.
And we did this project for a client of ours,
L&L Holdings, the owner of the building.
And typically, our clients want fly throughs, right?
Typically, they want some marketing Material
to either rent their buildings to other buildings
or win a competition.
And they typically want everything
that we do very fast, right?
So, it's always a very difficult back and forth
in between our clients that are architects
or our clients that are owners, right?
Of buildings. So, this is all ray traced.
This is all global illumination, reflections, refractions.
Everything is being ray traced in real-time
and rendered into screens.
So, I want to teleport right here,
look up at this building.
And this file is being lit by an HDRI, right?
So, you could change the HDRI to affect the scene
immediately and change the lighting.
See what your Materials are going to be looking like,
see what your building's going to looking like.
So, if there's two avenues you can go here.
So, if you're a designer,
if you're working on specific Materials,
Material properties, what are they going to look like
at different times of day and things like that?
If you're working at a place like Neoscape
and we're working on an animation,
the art director and the 3D artists can go in
and do all of these exercises in real-time.
So obviously the typical path that we follow on any building
is outside going to the lobby, up to the office building,
and then maybe show some amenities
and then go back out and show the building.
So that's what I'm going try to do here.
So, we're outside, I'm going to hit enter right here
and go into a different level.
So, this is the lobby and you notice that when I move,
if you'll go out and look up on the upper left corner,
there's two numbers there,
the frames per second and the resolution.
So, when I'm moving, I am lowering the resolution
because everything is ray traced to 50% of the pixels
of the screen in which is being shown.
So, you can move and then once you stop it just goes back
to the 100% of the resolution that you want to see.
And from here, like Craig was saying earlier,
just like in twin motion, you can do still rendering in 4K
in a matter of seconds of this same image.
For this particular client,
we did something ridiculous like this.
In this case it was important for our client
to portray how tall these lobby was, right?
And then the people that are going to be
working on this building
are typically people that are going to be working
on finance and something like that.
So, we're like, okay, let's do a Learjet.
No, that's too much. That's for the owner of the building.
Let's do maybe a couple of Teslas.
Okay. So that you can see how tall that that was.
So that was a fun thing to do there.
But you know, something we're doing for other clients is,
in Unreal, doing things like this,
we have a client that designs its own stores
and they sell jewelry.
So, we do things like populating the stores
to certain percentages
so they can see how it would be the store when he's 20%, 30%,
40%, 50%, 100% occupancy, right?
And see if the spaces are good enough for their staff
and for their customers.
So, I'm going to show you what it looks like without ray tracing.
So that's the raster reflections,
which is just a projection of a map
and that's the real-time ray traced reflections.
You see we're getting 24 frames a second
at 100% of the resolution.
Now I'm going to go up to the office space.
I'm want to teleport right here.
So, I turned on global illumination right there.
There's nice things you can do.
You can do in Unreal, we program this little bar right here
so that we can turn on and off the specific features
of real-time ray tracing; reflections,
refractions, occlusion, which is the most,
the effects that take the most computational power
to make something look photorealistic,
Cancel and ignore.
And you know, again, just like very simple things
to see what the scene could change.
Maybe changing the time of day, changing anything.
You really can move here and no problem.
Another thing that we do a lot with our clients is animations.
This is the heaviest file we have so far in these samples,
I'm going to turn off global illumination.
I'm going to press P to play a very short animation
that I made just as a case study.
You know, can we make an animation out of these?
And then either render it in real-time and,
or render it with a single GPU and make an animation out of it.
So that's giving us forty something frames a second
at a hundred percent resolution.
So, there's lights turning on and off, real-time ray
traced reflections, animated objects,
self-illuminated Materials lighting the scene,
things that you would not necessarily
be able to visualize on an offline pipeline;
offline rendering pipeline.
See, it's always difficult to explain to clients
that what they're seeing right now is not a video.
It's being rendered as we are watching it.
So obviously a basketball court
in a Wall Street type office, right?
Because they need to really think about their stock.
So, let me just show you a little bit here.
Just this space lit up with a self-illuminated
light, Material on the light.
Turn global illumination back on.
And like I mentioned earlier, this whole scene,
this, we did not curate any of these for a game.
We grabbed our V-ray Max scenes, which we typically use
and literally just dragged them into Unreal with Datasmith
with no regard whatsoever about optimizing furniture.
Now, the one thing that we did make sure
was that the same chair that was repeated was an instance
so that Unreal would know that that was just one asset.
That was the one thing that we did do.
And we did optimize the Teslas.
I just dropped a quick optimization on them
so that they weren't like these ridiculous amount of polygons.
But this file is millions and millions,
tens of millions of polygons
that you're seeing rendered in real-time at the moment.
Let me turn the lights back on here.
So obviously, as I move, the quality degrades,
but once you slow down and once you leave it there,
the quality of the visuals gets a lot better.
So, we're going to go now, we went through the exterior,
the lobby, the office space,
and we're going to go to the amenities.
Up at the top of the building and in a different time,
different setup at night. Let's go.
So, this is also lit with an HDRI from the outside.
The last two levels were just lit
with the standard Sun and Sky from Unreal Engine.
So, this is just an HDR.
You can do simple things like change Materials
and see all the reflections
and the refractions in there happening in real-time.
We can add, moving objects and self-illuminating object
with more lights and see what their-
I'm going to lower the resolution to 50%,
so we can see the animation in real-time.
So again, there's just, we did just some very basic functions
for these so we could adapt to the limitations
of just running on one GPU, right?
Changing the time of day, changing the HDR.
I'm going to go outside here so you can see
and go back up to 100%
and change the HDR that is lighting the scene.
You'll notice that those buildings in there,
those are photos, right? There like photos on cards.
And so, I chose four different HDRs that were later in the day,
so that they would look more or less like the buildings
with the lights on would belong there.
So, it does a pretty good job at faking it.
You know, you just need to be careful with that stuff.
So, this was quickly proving to us that we could do
marketing material like this for our clients.
So, let me go back outside and I'll just play you
one last quick animation on the exterior of the building.
So, once we did this,
this literally was an Epic, Neoscape, Lenovo, Nvidia,
before the RTX cards
were released to start testing these features.
And so, yeah, it's all well and good. It all worked.
It was awesome, but what else can we do? Right?
So, what- how does it-? We know it can benefit our clients,
we know it can benefit us, we can benefit our pipeline.
It's another great tool for us to be able to produce content
on tight deadlines and of high-quality content.
But internally at Neoscape you guys know, if you know us,
that we try to do always very heavily curated art
that is not necessarily
just a fly through like I'm showing you here.
It's just very basic. It was just about the RTX features.
So, I figured, let's do a little experiment.
And I got a guy that's our chief creative officer and said,
hey, let's make a movie. What do you mean?
We're going to grab this same dataset
and we're going to make the movie
we want for this building.
It'll be just one minute or something like that.
Okay. So, I explained to him, this is the vision I have
and I need you to make me a mood board
from which I'm not going to deviate
and you'll be the art director. I'll be the 3D artist.
And then we're going to get a guy that works
with us doing Blueprinting and he's going to participate
in whatever capacity he can participate.
And what I was trying to prove there
is how can we use this technology in a creative
setting with people that are not familiar with Unreal,
people like me that are somehow familiar with Unreal
and a person that is very familiar with Unreal
doing Blueprints and programming,
but he's not a 3D artist and what can come out of that.
So, what I'm about to show you next is that.
A four-minute long animation, an abstract art piece,
if you will,
of this building where everything you see animated,
there's supposed to be music with it,
but something is not coming through, but it doesn't matter.
That's not the point of this. There you go.
I'll shut up, you just watch it for a second.
So, one of the interesting things that happened
when we were doing this was,
the art director would come to my desk
when we were doing the look and feel of this animation.
And he'd say, we're used to working offline
rendering, Max Vray scenes.
He'd Say, "hey maybe it's too blue, it's too dark,
it's too contrasty the and all that."
And he would immediately start to walk away
expecting that those changes would take a long time
and I would immediately would like
just grab him by the shirt and be like,
"no, no, no, no. We can do it right now.
We can actually decide those things right now."
And I'll show you in a second.
There's like wet puddles on the street and things like that.
All of those things and all of the art direction
was precisely something we could do together.
I didn't have to wait to render any frames to show him
where the reflections were,
how dark it was, how crazy it was.
Was it too grainy? Are the lens flares too much?
Who cares? That wasn't the point.
The point was we can do a four-minute long 4K animation
in one machine.
And you're seeing it render right now in real-time.
I did render this whole animation in one machine
with a Quadro 5000 in less than an hour.
4K frames with all the post on it, fully ray traced.
And that was why we did the experiment
because it was just crazy.
We have a render farm who have a hundred CPUs
that would take two days to do that.
Four days to do that.
And that's why we did this experiment.
We're quite happy with the result.
It's a little bit out there, it doesn't do really anything
for anyone other than we saw, I was like,
oh neat. It looks cool and that's that. Right?
But you know, I'll just-
I'll show you some of the nice things about these
is that everything that you're seeing
was just animated and edited right here.
The color grade, there's supposed to be rain,
the rain's off at the moment.
There's supposed to be music, it's there.
But everything was right here. Everything was done in Unreal.
And yes, I did use that data
set that I showed you earlier, right?
With the exact same lighting.
I did not change anything but the color grade
and just the simple idea of collaborating with people.
So that was that.
And just the ability to do these things
from the one platform to us
was mind blowing and something that we really enjoyed.
We could make decisions right there right then and there.
We did not have to worry about the hassle
of doing the rendering.
And that hassle, by the way, I am trying to solve it
for myself and for my clients, right?
So, the frustration, I feel the same frustration
our clients feel when you tell them,
oh, well I have to render, it's rendering. Right?
And with these I can literally just grab my laptop,
go to my client and say, this is it.
This is not a rough version of it. This is it.
And we can actually make those decisions,
change whatever we have to change with them.
And I don't have to run back to the office
and tell ten people what the client said.
So that was the purpose of this demo.
I hope that you enjoyed it and that it was helpful to you.