So, I wrote an article about a month ago about how VR is going to completely
change the way that we design in architecture and also the way that we
visualize architecture. I put that up on my blog and today again well a couple
weeks ago we had the release of unreal studio from Epic Games with the data
Smith importer which was a big deal I made a video about that as well and it's
a huge workflow bridge between art viz and VR which i think is awesome because
clearly these guys all see that that's the way the industry is moving today we
have another huge announcement from Kaos group saying that introducing that v-ray
for unreal is now in open beta so I want to take a look at kind of what that does
Here I am on the Cairo chaos group site we can join the beta we can download
you'll need an account to get it and then we just install it and I'm gonna
take this scene without adjusting anything and see how it does performing
kind of like I did with data Smith just export this import it into Unreal Engine
and see what kind of things we can get and we'll look at a few of the things
that come with the Reeve a for Unreal Engine beta a few notes about
installation here I'm installing the software to install it for 419 it's also
compatible with 418 I'm gonna make this a local v-ray license server machine and
it's going to install the online license server with this installation if you
don't need that you can uncheck install it and then it'll ask you to sign in to
your online license server with the same credentials that you downloaded the beta
with and as always v-ray installs very quickly and easily ok to do our work
here it's pretty easy all we have to really do is right-click and do a viewer
a scene exporter of this building here I'm just gonna leave those settings as
is and create a path for it to go to now in your epic games launcher make sure
you've got the latest 4.19 I'm gonna have to update here bewray will not show
up as one of the installed plugins but it is there I'll show you how to get it
running once we're inside the engine ok inside of for nine
tene 4.19 Unreal Engine I am just going to set a new project that is blank and
the settings don't really matter we're just say v-ray import test create
project let's see what happens okay it should come up with a sign saying new
plugins are available you can either go to manage plugins or you can just come
up here go to settings settings plugins make sure be ready for unreal is enabled
want that enabled as well and unreal editor must be restarted so you can just
hit restart now if you get this it means that you might not have the latest
update for 4.19 so make sure and get that okay I got my engine updated and it
only takes up about 17 billion gigabytes on my hard drive so I cleared everything
out so I can get it on there it's all updated now and the first thing you
should see is that the plugins are up and enabled so we're ready to go now you
should see a v-ray button up here check this check settings it should come up
with settings if your license server is working properly ok once you get into
unreal and everything's installed properly you should be able to hit the
v-ray settings here and this will come up if it doesn't come up it's probably
because you have a licensing issue but make sure you get your online licensing
working properly and linked to the same account that you downloaded your demo
from or your beta from then everything should work now when we go to import we
can click on our file and it gives us the option to bring in all these things
I'm gonna leave my settings like this and import didn't have any lights in the
scene so that's ok let's give it two in second let's give it a second to import
ok here here it comes it's compiling the shader still this imported quite a ways
away from zero probably because of where it was in max that's okay we can go into
our world outliner and select when these objects and hit F and it'll focus on it
take us to where we need to be okay so I do like this one nice thing about the
is that this comes in with the pivot in the right spot as you can see in the
center of the object but it does not have to be parented to a little a little
node like the data Smith importer does so that's kind of nice so when you
select this you're actually selecting D static mesh not a dummy object that is
its parent and the pivots as you can see are in the right place now what I have
noticed with the v-ray importer is that a lot of materials do not work I'm not
sure why I've only imported a few other things
haven't fully tested this I just trying to demonstrate what happens when you try
to bring this in for the very first time and I didn't change anything as you know
but here it comes there's a lot of shaders that just don't work so I click
on this it will say a parent material that is unknown okay for the materials
that did work it's kind of cool like garage door okay so what it will do is
it takes a parent material of v-ray material and then if you go into this
it's totally insane that's the v-ray material but then some
of these settings are editable in the material instance okay so it's like
these are parameters in that parent material that can be edited and they set
it up so that these parameters actually adjust similar to what a regular brdf
v-ray material would be like so this is something you'll be used to have used
v-ray a lot so now it just becomes instead of node-based stuff you can just
change the diffuse color or apply a map use diffuse texture and then you can
just put a map in there right okay and then there's the for nail reflection
settings there's the reflection color so you can make it have a reflection color
okay so it's kind of cool that they set it up so that it works like a viewer a
material and then the gloss is just like normal see how that works pretty cool so
again if you are used to using v-ray materials then this will all make tons
of sense to you and maybe the Unreal
materials don't okay so I don't know if I like this or not I kind of have gotten
used to the Unreal materials and I like how the data Smith converts v-ray to
unreal but you still edit it as an unreal type material this one you're
truly editing it as if it was a v-ray material still it is quite a bit simpler
probably so self illumination setting again these are all settings that we
would be used to so that's how the materials work in here they're all just
children of that parent v-ray material okay and now the other thing that is
cool about this is that you can type in v-ray over here and you'll see you have
a v-ray Sun and a sky v-ray settings environment these are like the override
settings in 3ds max okay so you can put you know a background color that will be
your dome light basically you can see that's changing my background color
right okay so we won't really need that we can change the GI color here let's
just set this back to default we can bring in the v-ray Sun and sky which is
cool okay that immediately lights up our scene so I really like the idea of this
the fact that you can do that and then what you do is you just edit it over
here the v-ray Sun and sky root object here can be edited with the elevation so
you can just slide it up slide it down that of course changes the color much
like raising it above the horizon in 3ds Max and v-ray this setting can actually
rotate the Sun around you can see that with the directional light selected you
can rotate the Sun we need a light mass importance box in here okay let's build
the lighting in here see what we get we'll just go on preview build lighting
okay with the lighting built this is where we're at right now
so it basically came in working however I will say that I think the data Smith
plug-in really has it figured out better than v-ray importer at this point and
it's just a viewer a scene save out and import which is nice I mean it's very
simple and easy but like I said I've been getting a lot of these materials
that don't work right for whatever reason you need to go back and look what
the common theme is we between those materials and it's looking
okay but I feel like it might need a little more work than it would if it was
a data Smith so there is some promising things though I like that the v-ray Sun
and sky is in here because that kind of simplifies the whole process no longer
direct light settings plus skylight settings it's just a matter of dragging
and dropping that in and then using the one object to adjust there's other cool
things in here with the v-ray plug in the physical camera okay you can look
through that your physical camera do this back up and you can actually render
a scene of course in traditional v-ray fashion okay with this camera setting we
can find it over here and we can edit its details we can change the shutter
speed to change the exposure of the camera you can see my v-ray Sun and sky
settings are not working great yet not sure why I have to go in and mess with
those but they're not working great but it is nice that you have familiar view
ray settings in here I mean just the physical camera settings are similar to
what we have in B ray we have 3d studio max adjust the white balance right here
and then it has some more of the traditional post-processing settings in
it as well that can make that camera look like kind of whatever you want and
then you can also go to settings and render an actual scene I'll just do that
real quick I'll leave the settings as default and
just hit v-ray and it actually brings up something we're all familiar with the
v-ray frame buffer and you can render with actual ray tracing right out of
Unreal Engine which is an interesting feature not sure if it's something I'm
going to want but it is here okay and looking through the camera and hitting
render this is what I'm getting currently I have no idea why I'm sure
there's some good explanation for what's going on here but the point is you can
in fact render from v-ray with real ray tracing and it's got settings that you'd
be familiar with again so it's nice that we basically have a scene
that's mostly ready here there's obviously a lot of lighting things that
would have to be fixed with the light maps and things like that that would be
pretty common for data Smith as well I feel like v-ray right now for Unreal
Engine is more of a beta product than data Smith is and that data Smith I know
has been in beta for a lot longer and it's just become open to the public in
the last couple weeks but I feel like it's a much more polished software at
this point but that being said v-ray for unreal does do a similar thing of just
importing your scene directly in very quickly and easily and it adds some
additional functionality that we are used to in v-ray so for some arctas
artists this might be more appealing than the data Smith version so far I'm
going to continue using the data Smith for now but I can see in the future that
I might be thinking be so nice to have a v-ray summon sky it'd be nice to be able
to spit out a rendering this since I've already got it in in real time I could
just do a full ray trace rendering of it and give that to a client you know that
kind of thing I like the physical camera I think that's promising especially if
they could integrate in perspective control like they have in 3d studio max
I haven't seen that yet maybe I just haven't looked hard enough but I think
that would be a huge tool but yeah that's the a first look at the v-ray for
unreal interesting product mostly I just love that the industry is realizing the
need for arc vis and real-time rendering to really merge together and I think
that in the future we will be doing much more real-time VR a lot more things in
Unreal Engine and I'm really glad that there's these different links that are
being developed to make it easier for that to happen
so hopefully you enjoyed this check out these products go get your view ray beta
for unreal and keep up the good work