Unreal Engine 5... get ready for jaw drop

Grab the popcorn and get ready to get mind blown.
All realtime ligthing, billions of polygons, geometry reverb of sound, line of sight from mm to horizon…
For all I can understand THIS must be the end to the debate that game engines are just smoke and mirrors compared to CAD floating point accuracy, don’t you agree?
@gustojunk ref 8k textures and high polycounts on the megascans.

And Unreal rased the bar regarding tech demos here, when you make a tech demo that actually makes you want to see the rest of the narrative then you have done good in my book :slight_smile:

(Spoiler alert: Demo is ran on a PS5, so this is not a crazy overclocked sub zero freon studio rig with 8x gpus)

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Rhino integration with UE4 through Datasmith, slowly but it’s getting better. Maybe it’s time to take the second approach to that Rhino Inside UE4 thing.

Blueprints are not that easy to pick up as Grasshopper… Some time ago Rhino leaned toward architecture, and to some extent, the same happened with UE4 and Archwiz.

These two pieces of software could beautifully complement each other.

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That’s not really the “debate,” but of course it’s not really a debate…it’s just whining that Rhino’s realtime viewport doesn’t look like that, not understanding that 1)as you said, this is a DEMO, so by definition it IS smoke&mirrors; 2) There aren’t actually billions of polygons, there may have been in the original assets created to generate the normal maps; 3)For all the cool stuff going on a game is a STATIC thing that’s been processed and designed from the ground up to optimize exactly how much detail it’s trying to push at any moment; 4)There are more people working on that than all of the graphics programmers in the entire CAD industry, and you still don’t see anyone actually building a CAD product on top of this which would seem to make all the sense in the world to give everyone a free massive performance increase…y’all don’t think there might be a reason??

Nice. For now I still wish we have a “Fog” option in Rhino OpenGL viewport. Just keeping my expectations in check…

Hi Jim,
Did you listen to the video? The point is that this IS real time and the data is massive. (handled by Unreal Engine of course) The statue is of 30M polygons with out normal mapping and stuff, it is the raw data.

  1. ALL realtime (and old school rendered) data is smoke and mirrors. The only thing differentiating a game from cad is that the cad data used to be massive, but this is changing now. Cad data is also just a mesh with wires drawn on top, and it is rendered with both sides on, and drawn with a higher accuracy, but that is changing too.

  2. It IS actually billions of polygons, but games are smart and don’t draw what you can’t see, and can be set up to ignore huge data amounts based on what regions the camera is in. But this too is changing since the engine now handles massive amounts of data.

  3. It is no longer static, that’s the point, it’s dynamic and can be moved around. There is no need for baking. (Test out TwinMotion to see for your self, it’s based on UE4)

  4. This is true and the market is driven by hard competition, so they have to move on at high speeds. BUT CAD apps are starting to use this, the mentioned TwinMotion is an example. The reason is probably that CAD apps are evolved and builds on them selves. It takes time to change an industry, and what you have is tested, solid and well suited for production. (but these requirements has game development too, it is a massive industry)
    I am also sure that the bigger brains can fill in a lot here, as my knowledge is of course limited.

That said, I have worked quite a bit in TwinMotion and must say that I can’t see any big reason for why not an entire cad tool for architects could be built on top of it.

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Hi Holo,

First off I’d like to warmly thank Seghier Khaled for his impressive renderings done in Twin Motion which convinced me to give this product a try.

Not much impresses me anymore but this indeed is jaw dropping. This is how the future will proceed and I think the twinmotion link is one of the best things to come to rhino in a number of years. It’s like rain after a long drought. Kudos to the developers who had the foresight to make this a reality.

I can’t believe how easy it is now to get great looking animations out the door for clients using twin with special fxs like fog, rain, fire, character props vehicles, foliage, seasonal and time of day studies. This alone is gold, I spend a lot of time in max with Vray and I love that system and it’s the best for high quality but twin and unreal fill the gaps for fast rendering and quick turn around to clients. I can’t wait to try the vr glasses after I look into which ones to buy.

Holo you are ahead of the curve I’m really impressed with your knowledge and foresight about these things. It’s not accepted here but this is the way things will go, the next step will be modeling in that environment. In the future for high end manufacturing g2 surfs and surf continuity etc. all will be built off of preexisting models as a sculpting base in a game environment to lessen design to market time, these environments will already have speed analysis so the modeler can see how their surface or vehicle reacts under loads and speeds and in various weather. It’s all merging to vr real time which makes sense. I saw a few jobs already where this pipe line is looking for candidates to make this happen.

I’m trying to wrap my head around unreal game engine but I’m going to wait now for 5 to be released since all these great things are in 5. The current version I have is 4.5 which added high quality and unlimited size rendering.

Again I’m totally impressed and happy about the twin motion link, I wish the GH link was a real link and one where we don’t have to bake first but hopefully that’s coming. Also Twin can crash so save often but man I can’t believe the scenes I’m doing right out of the box with complete detailed terrains and foliage.

Thanks for posting this and for your knowledge about these products and getting us to see something really valuable which might have slipped under the radar.

RM

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I’ve been dabbling in UE. They’re imperfect but the client seems satisfied. They were really excited to get like 150 images at 5k resolution instead of the usual 12 at 1920x1080 or whatever.

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There is a Rhino Twinmotion Direct Link webinar this week. You can always ask some questions there.

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Signed up.

Downloaded.

Thanks for the link Scott.

Yep I’ve always dreamed on building something like Grasshopper from scratch using C++ and UE4. Not an easy task but game engines are one on the top apps when talking about high performance. There’s a wonderful bridge between Houdini and UE4 (I haven’t tried Rhino.Inside for UE4), but you still have to use Houdini to create the Digital Assets and import them to UE4 where you can modify the parameters. A real “native” solution would be a game changer.

Try Rhino.Inside.UE. if it works, a cool project would be grasshopper components that are UE aware. You could write them in python or C# and interact directly with UE.

I’ll give it a try, my current worflow is Rhino->Houdini->UE4 the reason is that everything I’m rendering is a given, so no need to try and have something that changes dynamically for now and I am adding vegetation in Houdini procedurally for my buildings, so I only need the models to seed my procedural climbing plants. But I will try it, I tried it once for Revit and it had a bug in which I had to bake stuff from GH to Rhino then reference the baked stuff back in GH to be able to use it, but it was like 6 months ago.

The rhino to Revit issue is a different story. In that case it is one of workflow. You can reference objects in both directions, but it is not logical for bi-directional on the same object. It is the same functional logic of rhino and grasshopper. But that is probably for another thread them this one.

The Twinmotion link will have object swapping in it. So you can have Twinmotion swap in vegetation from simpler objects in rhino automatically. Lots of possibilities with workflows. And more are coming.

Hi Scott, @scottd
Will McNeel publish the webinar on youtube or Vimeo in the near future? I can’t make the webinar but am really interested to see it.
It would be really cool to use 2d entourage in Rhino top view then swipe out in Twin for real 3d vegetation and have Gh count the plants etc to a part list. So I hope we can use 2d plan elements as that would make it easy when we get plans from architects and not have to use 3d proxies.
Thanks,
RM

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Hi Ryan,
Nice work and congrats on getting your workflow into unreal, how do get rhino models into unreal? Is it using obj export?
RM

@3dsynergy

In general I used datasmith to bring the 3dm boat in whole. It did a reasonable job meshing… about as good as you could expect for a magic button kind of tool.

I didn’t really find a good way to automate material assignment, so I ended up making a horribly written and probably unnecessarily elaborate python script that basically explodes all blocks, groups objects with similar materials in layers, then names the layer the material name… Which is super hack but at least it allowed me to drag/drop materials in unreal onto like a dozen layers and be done with it.

This is where it gets interesting. Not sure what is going to work the best. The Twinmotion link will replace/assign materials to the model on import and I believe will remember those associations in future updates. Since Twinmotion runs on UE, it might be the next step in the link.

What I don’t know if it is in Twinmotion does that men it can be used anywhere in the UE universe?

Of course Rhino 7 has PBR materials and so does UE. So we probably could look at how well they parallel each other? It will be worth testing.

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It will be recorded. You can register for the webinar and then you should get updates on when the recording is ready. We will probably blog about it once the video is put up in the public. Although, sometimes we miss those posts with everything going on right now.

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Thanks Ryan I see they have a vray converter too. Now that I’ve looked into it more the workflow is like Lightscape where you remesh according to the detail you want to capture and then bake.
I grabbed the datasmith convertor for max as well. Thanks for the hints.
RM

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