From the Future to the Now
An interview conducted by Oliver Salway with Ken Pimentel, architecture industry manager at Epic Games.
How video games software is set to revolutionise architectural design. ‘Extended realities’, be they fully immersive virtual environments or augmented reality overlays, have long promised to revolutionise the way designers in the AEC sector create and communicate their work. But it’s video game software, rather than traditional CAD packages that’s finally enabling that change.
A version of this article was originally published on Archiboo.com
At the forefront of this transformation are Epic Games, developer of the market-leading ‘Unreal Engine’ software, which since 1998 has been powering the most challenging and visually seductive computer games. By combining clever coding with ever increasing graphical processor power, Unreal Engine has an unequalled ability to conjure scenes of incredible scale and complexity - in real-time; something that would bring other systems to their knees.
As VR pioneer and Epic’s Strategic Business Development Manager for AEC, Ken Pimentel explains, “Epic’s always been about high fidelity. And scale. It's the high end. It's the most powerful engine with the best visuals. It isn’t really just about VR - It's about the many immersive qualities that you can bring together today. We effectively want to build a time machine to go into the future to experience that future state of the building. It has so much to teach us, that future state. And it will affect how we design and what we learn from that.”
Epic entered into the AEC market tangentially, led by the design community themselves. “Basically the game team noticed all these people self-adopting a game engine for their needs. Worldwide the non-game team at Epic must now be up to a couple hundred. In the UK alone we have a 30-strong team dedicated to non-games.” observes Pimentel.
Already, practices are finding innovative ways to utilise Unreal Engine’s immersive power even at the concept stage. Before joining Epic as Business Development Manager, David Weir-McCall worked in the Digital Design team at CRTKL, where his team used head-tracking within Unreal Engine environments to study what people were looking at, providing valuable insight and input into evolving concept designs.
A favourite quote of Pimentel’s is Maya Lin’s observation that architecture “has to be experienced. It can’t be described. We can draw it up and we can make models of it, but it can only be experienced as a complete whole.” For him, that captures a lot about the value of experience “and this need to bring that experience from the future to now, so that we can learn from it. ‘Is this the way I really want it?’ The more effective we are at doing that, the more valuable it is. The more true that experience can be, the more you can learn from it”.
Elsewhere, the fact that game engines have to support gamer’s desires for multi-player experiences means that Unreal Engine has the ability to effortlessly support collaborative ways of working. Combining that with standard BIM data exchange protocols permits teams to compile virtual ‘snagging lists’ of designs as they develop.
The unrivalled capability of Unreal Engine to handle massive datasets means that whole cities can be explored live. These can either be idealised parametrically-generated worlds, built using Esri’s CityEngine, or the 60 square-kilometre model of London from AccuCities, which has the ability to see where a building is visible from at any location. Verified views will never be the same again. “We, more than anyone else, are able to handle this complex data and let you play with it - at 60 frames per second, even on a laptop.” says Pimentel.
Epic have cleverly hedged their bets in the AEC market by developing two products built upon the Unreal Engine core. The first is the ‘Unreal Engine’ suite. Featuring the ‘Unreal Studio’ design package, it offers the technically minded power-user the ability to rummage around under the bonnet of their virtual worlds, write custom scripts in the C# programming language and adjust an infinity of settings. Whether it is taken to heart by the professional visualisers it is aimed at will depend a little on how close it’s heavily optimised real-time imagery can come to the pristine quality of traditional ‘off-line’ renders - if indeed it needs to. Pimentel admits that while “there's a lot of stuff we don't do, like complex glass, I think we do do the 80% that people need. I think there will be kick-back from the visualiser community, but I think that they will be beaten back by the fact that it's the real time route.”
But if you’re able to go beyond visualisers and put these tools in the hands of the general designer, you can tap into a much larger potential market. Much in the same way that the easy-to-use Sketchup CAD package is accessible to 3D-novices, who have little interest in mastering the complexities of Rhino or Revit. And this is where Epic’s other product, ‘Twinmotion’ comes in.
Twinmotion harnesses the graphical power of the exact same ‘Unreal Engine’ core, but provides an attractively simple user interface. It’s specialised tools give architects with little technical knowledge the ability to create sophisticated visualisations. It allows users to populate complex scenes not just with their architectural models, but also add in vegetation, pre-animated 3D people, traffic, even cats, dogs and horses.
And there are a nifty set of data links that allow you to synchronise a Twinmotion visualisation with an evolving model from a wide range of CAD and BIM packages, updating as you go. In future it’s also planned to allow designers to start work within the streamlined Twinmotion environment and then hand over to expert visualisers to add more complex behaviours in Unreal Studio, which could be a compelling workflow. It’s already proving more popular than even Epic themselves expected. As Pimentel notes, “We have at this point 450,000 people registered for Twinmotion. And I think 90% of those downloads are involved in architecture”.
Perhaps this is partly due to the feeling that conventional architectural visualisation has drifted into boringly fetishised pixel-perfect stills and animations. Whereas for gamers, fluidity of motion and interaction were always more important than strict visual accuracy. But what the games may have lacked in graphical detail, they more than compensated for in terms of atmosphere. The ‘game engines’ could generate in real-time the sorts of emotionally charged special effects viewers were accustomed to from the movies - fog and smoke, fire, water, glowing lights, even falling rain and snow.
By giving designers access to the kind of visual effects normally reserved for the entertainment industry, Twinmotion also extends the architectural palette. We’re accustomed to viewing designs through the lens of the perennially sunny marketing visual, but how much more richly might designs evolve when we can - with the click of the mouse - simulate how they might feel in a thunderstorm, or when the leaves turn in Autumn? All of which is possible with great ease with Epic’s software, and importantly, all in real time.
Catia aerospace software reset the boundaries of what one could dare to construct in terms of buildings, and parametric scripting software Grasshopper has transformed the skylines of emerging cities across central Europe and Asia. In the same way, perhaps software like Twinmotion could be the gateway drug to a new kind of effects-driven architecture? More than just a sexy presentation tool, it enables you to design the atmosphere and ambience from the get-go.
Rather than static ‘key views’, Twinmotion actively encourages the user to think in terms of moving tableaux and to quickly create emotionally-resonant storyboards of the user experience. Used judiciously, it could significantly enhance the subtlety of architectural design. It could change the way architects think about how their spaces will be perceived - not just in the marketing phase, but right from the earliest concept stages. Rather than having to convey initial experiential concepts via mood-boards of abstract atmospheric imagery, with these tools you can actually ‘sketch’ with fully animated atmospheric effects. Unlike much CGI software, cost isn’t necessarily the barrier here anymore, as Twinmotion is keenly priced - but I think it’s just not a design approach architects (unlike Hollywood concept artists) have been exposed to much as of yet.
But more than that, Twinmotion’s real-time interactivity means it's actually great fun to use. Thirty years ago when I started producing CG visuals, expectations were far lower and the software much simpler, so even though the results were crude by today’s standards, it was still a magical process. But that pleasure had long since faded, replaced by a tedious and time-consuming cycle of miniscule incremental adjustments and test-renders, that leave both designer and visualiser drained. For me, a few minutes with the straightforward and intuitive Twinmotion software brought that sense of excitement straight back. The responsiveness of the real-time results is addictively rewarding, and just makes you want to experiment, and be able to do so in a time-efficient manner.
“Just imagine, having the ability to change all those creative elements in real time. Getting real-time feedback on them.” says Pimentel. “I talk about ‘what-ifs?’ per hour - a new metric when you're with real time. It's this new world where you're not constrained by the feedback process. You're able just to rush forwards and explore so many design dimensions because the decision making can be done in real time.”
So where does this leave the off-line render?
“Yeah, exactly.” concludes Pimentel wryly.