At the GDC (good conference to presents 3D configurators), Valve officially announced the successor to Source, the engine in which the promising Half-Life 2 was developed. Source 2 will be free for developers to use. This, combined with similar announcements from Epic and Unity, will help maintain the dominance of PCs as the leading content authoring platform.
Real-time rendering has proven its ability to create engaging, dynamic experiences across a variety of platforms, including virtual reality. Until recently, however, these experiences were primarily limited to video games, not professional CAD applications. Although possible, the process required to export CAD designs to software such as Unreal Engine was a laborious one, so if you’ll excuse the pun, Unreal Studio can be a game changer.
Real-time rendering continues to grow.
Those who remember the beginnings of real-time 3D rendering will remember the clunky and hacked graphics associated with it. The 1980s Battlezone game included green wire models of tanks that seemed so impressive at the time that the U.S. Army used them to train their tank gunners. The technology has since progressed so far that it’s almost impossible to distinguish a game like Call of Duty from the real world.
Game engine technology is so advanced that the quality of real-time rendering competes with traditional render engines. The next natural step was for visualization professionals to start using real-time rendering for presentations, collaboration, and other activities that were not possible when renderings used to take hours, days, and even weeks.
In workflows that have always used traditional rendering processes such as animated TV series, architectural visualization, and even technical visualization, real-time rendering can replace traditional render engines and accelerate the development of still images, presentation videos, 360-degree videos, interactive fly-throughs, and other presentation materials by a factor of 100 or more.
Real-time rendering is entering the construction, mechanical, and electrical industries. In the civil sector, a team of artists from vrbn.io recently tested real-time rendering with a dense city model from the CityEngine urban planning software.
With Unreal Studio, the CityEngine model was imported into Unreal Engine with automatic optimizations to enable real-time rendering. Users can then navigate and explore the environment in real time. The result was a breathtaking presentation of an urban environment with dense foliage, streets and paths and a complex set of unique buildings.