Blueprint - My 3D designs

This is my journey throughout the year. I'm professionally working as a graphic designer, and nonetheless, in my free time, I started doing 3D such as archviz and other things. In the summer, I worked with a couple of friends on some renders hoping to create a business out of it, but due to their studies, it wasn't possible. Moreover, I couldn't do it by myself at that time. So one of my friends designed the places with SketchUp, and my other friend and I did the renders on Blender. I did not model any of it. I was just in charge of texturing, lighting, and rendering. We also used free 3D models. I worked on six projects in the summer. We focused on different sections of a house instead of a complete home.

To furnished the spaces we took inspiration from pinterest and sometimes our own. Then, the final images where edited in Lightroom.

BBQ (Backyard)

Bedroom

Studio

Gaming room

Later on, this year, I set a goal of learning UE5. Afterward, I received a notification about The Rookie Awards back in March. At that time, I could not start because I was learning the basics of Unreal Engine. So finally, after a month of using Unreal, I started my project. This house is my mom's dream house.

She used excel to design where house.

Initially, I was going to use this house for the last project I uploaded here, but I couldn't do it because of my lack of experience in 3D modeling and time. So the first was to design the functionalities of the application. I wanted to use the same system I did last year: Changing Materials, Day/Night cycle, and moving doors and objects. Right away, I knew it would be different from last year because I used Unity with a VR, and now I don't have a VR, and I'm using Unreal. Besides those features, I created a compass to show the cardinal points and a view from the top, similar to a blueprint.

At first, I thought of using baked lighting for realism purposes, but it would take me forever if I ever were to implement it per project. It takes too long to bake lights, especially if you want to achieve excellent shadow quality. Then I thought I would have the same problem as last year. I would have the same indirect light for different hours of the day, which does not make sense if you understand how light works. That's when it hit me; I could improve what I did by using UE's most prominent new features, Lumen and Nanite. In interior spaces, Lumen is at its worst. However, it is good enough to show the importance of choosing a material depending on where the sun rises and sets. Light behaves differently with different materials. You will probably have a warm tone in the morning, and the afternoon will be a cooler one. Depending on the design and placement in the real world, this could change because of the sunrise and sunset; however, in this case, it works perfectly, and you'll see why. In the case of Nanite, it helps because I would not have to worry about LODs (Levels of Detail). Working with LODs is awful as well as time-consuming. Nonetheless, Nanite has drawbacks, mainly in how I worked on this project.

I used Blender, then Twinmotion, and finally Unreal. I used Blender to model the house structure, main entrance door, kitchen cabinets, and bedroom closets. I also did the UVs. With Twinmotion, I furnished the whole house and assigned the materials to the FBX file imported from Blender. Afterward, I imported the project to Unreal. It created the LODs for all the objects from Twinmotion but not those from Blender. The distance from which it changed from one mesh to another was minimal, and the detail of the 3D model just looked terrible. I could have increased the distance, but that would hurt the performance. So I changed all the meshes to Nanite, which immediately looked great. However, the performance could have been better. The reason was that importing from Twinmotion to Unreal created duplicated objects. What I mean by duplicated is that if I were to use the same model of towels for all the bathrooms. Let's say I had five towels. In Unreal, I would have five meshes of the same towel. Now imagine that for everything. I had them replace all the meshes just for one to fix the awful performance. It was a little time-consuming, but it was tedious.

Part of the design of the house is the backyard, as well as the landscape. I used foliage to a decent enough amount so it would run smoothly. As for the landscape, to make it as accurate as possible, I used a displacement texture of the area and created a terrain. Then I added the Cotopaxi Volcano, which is a volcano that you can see from afar. In the end, it is as real life as it can be.

At the last minute, I fixed some issues and added a few features like a fireplace, environment sounds that change according to the hour of the day, and a virtual tour video.

The interactive architectural experience's name is Blueprint because of the top view feature and UE's programming language.

The plus about using Twinmotion is that I can also create Path Tracing Renders.

Note: The last image with the backyard was edited in photoshop with their new ai image generator.

In conclusion, doing this project has been gratifying because I learned more about Blender, Twinmotion, and Unreal while making my mom's dream house. Also, Real-time technology has dramatically improved, especially with Lumen and Nanite, but it is not quite there yet compared to Path Tracing. As we saw in the virtual tour video, the reflections suffer from some "noise," even worse when little light exists. However, the fact that I don't have to wait as much as a normal render, plus adding the interactivity aspect of it. It's worth it, and you can mix both Path tracing with real-time rendering into your workflow.