ZACK DIXON

As a new venture, the immersive experience company Nightscape set aside resources to develop an Architectural Visualization pipeline that would utilize realtime rendering in Unreal Engine. The idea was to give developers and sales professionals a 3D interactive tool for demonstrating and previsualizing their designs. Complete with furnishings, environmental flourish, and urban context. I lead a team of four artists in the design and construction of this space, using a proprietary pipeline that I designed together with technical producer Kevin Longwell. Using an externally supplied CAD, vectors were converted into quads by automatic and manual methods. Retopology was applied as needed in Blender and Cinema4D, and clean models were then imported into Unreal Engine but cycled out into third-party software for UV mapping as needed. Shading, lighting, and textures were applied in UE. Rendered visualizations of developing architecture is not a new concept, but taking advantage of a game engine to do so is relatively unexplored. To showcase what might be possible, we made the storefront area of the model hotswappable; the user could dynamically outfit the open space to be populated by either a retail storefront or a restaurant at the click of a button. I assigned separate artists to each type of space, and put together curated reference boards for them to initialize their layouts. For retail, I blended two open plan design styles; the post-industrial aesthetics typical of fashion brands such as Urban Outfitters, and the Japandi design style found in many Muji stores. For our restaurant, I chose a Japanese teppanyaki style but allowed for a section that featured traditional pit seating and tatami flooring (with a step up to indicate the removal of shoes, of course). For an office interior demonstration, I took references from high-end corporate interior design styles. Such as those found in investment firms and international ad agencies. Each layout required at least three iterations before committing to prop and feature construction. This stage required us to be strategic about the assets we used in the space, since we did not have enough time or extra artists to assign excessive prop modeling tasks. To demonstrate context, we put this mixed-use office space in a real location, and reproduced that area as accurately as possible. We chose a lot behind Nightscape's venue in downtown Nashville (empty at the time), and pulled photogrammetric scans of the city around that focal point. The scan quality is low, but unnoticeable at a distance. The users movement around the map is restricted in such a way that the buildings would always be just far enough away. For the buildings on the perimeter of our playable map, we simply replaced the low quality scans with custom-modeled reproductions of the buildings that would look much better up close.