ArchViz tips - Let's make Unity better than ever! (Photorealism)

Hi guys,

I'm just starting some archviz projects and wanted to know if you got any tips for super realistic renders inside unity, what tools are you using etc. I will share my work flow later and my own personal archviz tips and tricks.

 

Essential tools, MOST all free to use.

1) Blender + archpack addon + booltools addon
2) Crazy bump
3) Post processing effects
4) Affinity photo (not free)
5) CGtextures (tiled seamless textures)

More detailed explanations
#1 With blender there are some essential plugins, I've updated to the latest version, so go into preferences and enable bool tools (this helps with much easier Boolean operations, sure UVW for automatic geometric uv unwrapping and the arch plugin. You can download free models of the internet for archviz, but preparation of these are key. Normally they come as .3ds files so sometimes the bits aren't all together, to fix this normally clearing the location works. Second not all have nice topology but that doesn't matter so much. The key is to REDUCE the number of vertices and faces. Otherwise unity has a hissy when when trying to apply uvs. So use the DECIMATE modifier liberally. I normally crank it down to a stage where I feel it is still ok looking but not too bad. Then I apply the modifier and do convert tris to quads. Sometimes but not always the LIMITED DISSOLVE works to further clean up the mesh. If you have problems with the mesh baking as black in unity you need to FLIP THE NORMALS in blender. Also make sure to uvwrap your model, smart project normally works but not always, some free models are already uvunwrapped some are not.

Do I model everything inside blender?
That's a good question, but I wouldn't. Even though the navigation and quad view is great, when you're adding props like cabinets, bed etc, you will want to add them as prefabs inside unity, mainly because you will set all the materials and normal maps and apply uvs before, if you only do this inside blender it will slow down the work flow because you'll have to do this for EACH object inside unity.

#2 Crazy bump is a wonderful tool for quickly getting your floors or brick textures to pop, I just save out the normal map and that seems to do the treat, I've never tried the other ones but it is something to look into. Again, most of these can be found on cgtextures, and if you register an account you get 15 free credits every day. I keep a library of all my textures anyway. Personally, I don't think you need something extravagant like substance designer for archviz, you can get away without using it.

#3 Post processing effects are key! They make the scene pop, sadly on my mac I don't have access to the eye adaption effect, I've seen some youtube vids and I'm sure they'd make the scenes stand out! I just use anti-aliasing, contrast in the colour grading and exposure and saturation. Also a little of chromatic aberration and bloom with dust particles for that cool light beam on camera effect (not too much though)

#4 I use affinity photo for tweaking my textures by apply colour grading or rotating the textures. It is also great for creating seamless patterns.

#5 Yeah cgtextures you can grab most if not all your textures you need, again using crazy bump to make them pop.

Next I'm going to go over the most important stage lighting. . .

 

Lighting

[placeholder]

 

The Post effects stack

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This is a great way to derail discussion into oblivion.[/quote]

 

Lemme just stop you here.

 

What do you mean?

 

I'd just like to add this isn't a discussion about blender vs 3dmax or <insert other modelling software> please try to keep it on topic if you have any lighting or graphic improvement tips for unity I'm all ears. Thanks.

Also there's this free plugin I am using with blender So meh.

Spoiler: spoiler

 

@iamthwee

Keeps saying there's missing pre-fabs for me, also will you take out the post processing stack?

 

I would have expected to see a lot more pictures on a thread with such a title.

You might want to ask this artist what he's using, because it's by far the best archviz I've seen in Unity.

https://www.artstation.com/jerycedia



EDIT: In fact, you can get the package on gumroad if you want for five bucks:

https://gumroad.com/l/BtqyO

 

Longer than what? Also, more-than-decent textures can be found everywhere on the internet these days.

In any case, I think it looks fantastic, and IMO the post process v2 has a lot to do with it. I've put v2 in my game and it looks far better than it ever has before, and probably could be much better still once I get the hang of twiddling the controls.

 

So I bought that package off gumroad to try it out. EDIT: nevermind, hadn't read the instructions. Still doesn't quite look the same, a bit of bleeding and blurriness, not sure what to do about that.

Spoiler: As Advertised

 

Updated, didn't read the instructions. Still doesn't quite look so good though, blurriness especially.

 

Well I'm testing out Unity's SRP / HDRP, I have an arch viz package anyway so I'll post soon..

 

What if I don't consider lighting box realistic or desirable? Also why would I want Unity to be better than Unreal? That would mean Unity has to become Unreal since Unity can't be better than Unreal. It's totally different to Unreal, and will pretty much always render differently, no matter how slight.

For arch viz you need some serious GI bake settings, which I'd argue are more important than the renderer used even.

 

I think this is a good idea but I'd suggest you don't give tips until you actually have the results. Some bits of your current renders look good, others very unrealistic. Once you get photo-realistic results then post the tips. For now these are ideas

@hippocoder - Maybe better to name this post how to get photo-realistic ArchViz, I wouldn't expect its the go to to use either Unity or Unreal for ArchViz unless there's a need for a user to have fine grained navigation through the space. Probably be more usual to use tools like 3DS, V-Ray, Corona, etc.

 

Good idea, renamed it.

 

Maybe "better than ever" would sound better than "better ever"

 

Then you're in the wrong thread

Personally I think Unity's looked better than Unreal for some time now, issue is it's rather inconsistent.. I noticed there's still alot of Temporal AA Jitter etc.

Actually no, you don't really need "serious" bake times, with UE's photon mapping you can do like a hundred bounces in ten minutes top quality (then again 60 texels in Unity's progressive takes about the same).. I'd say you need a serious machine though..!

P.S I noticed you changed it but Unity's HDRP looks fantastic (even at this stage) and has real crap like lumens, *dances and wiggles in joy.. SSR is only a touch up not a fix for a bad scene.

Although I couldn't spit out the image, it seems the screencapture command takes it from a different buffer to what the HDRP line is spitting out.. So everything looked real weird.

 

Yeah I thought it would cause a lot of people to rush off and break it and post up glitchy blotchy images of it that made no sense. You know how people get sometimes.

 

I think the lit spot on the wall looks off/weird. Is it an automatically generated normalmap?

I think substance share should have some free bricks.

 

Meh, here's my attempt.. I'm not spending all week on it.! It did occur to me after the fact I could of just gotten the screenshot for the actual asset pack instead of messing around for hours LOL..!

The one I "re-did" at the top, the original at the bottom.. If you need breakdowns I can share from a technical perspective at least..

 

@ShadowK definitely would appreciate the breakdown, did you use PLM? How long did you bake it for? How are you using HDRP? Others would appreciate it to. Looks amazing BTW.

@neginfinity as a preliminary test I just threw a spotlight on the wall because there is a wall light above it, the falloff isn't tweaked at all and is way too bright, I guess HDRP would yield more desirable results. Also I didn't add a normal map on the bricks because I was swapping out the wall textures with blank walls etc (crazy bump normally does the trick for that), but I'll update the gitrepo today and do a retest.

 

Jeryce Dianingana is the best when it comes to lighting in Unity, the best!

 

The problem wasn't with falloff, but that the texture gave very strong Quake 2 feeling to it. Meaning it looked like old-style textures that had lighting baked in. Metalness/Roughness not tuned properly, bump looked off, etc. Judging by your comment I was right.

Also... if you're putting it onto github, watch out for copyright restrictions. For example, you are not allowed to upload assets you bought in store onto github, and many free texture sources forbid redistribution.

 

Well, this one actually looks good. Can you post lit wireframe of the top scene by the way? Kinda curious.

 

You don't have the display scale at 1.0 and his images are probably supersampled or scaled down from a higher res. And possibly done so after the fact in photoshop, which will look crisper depending on the scaling algorithm used.

 

Again, be warned if rushing off to try HDRP. Read the wiki page for it on github for instructions. It's more demanding on what it needs. You will need to generate packed maps and so on, it's not like throwing something from standard shader up and expecting any difference, just a heads up. You want to use it because it cleverly saves bandwidth and can reach higher quality with very high quality textures and packed maps.

 

ima skip HDRP anyway, I'm on a mac mini so. . .

 

I didn't add any normal maps, metallic maps or anything in that image, there's no material work whatsoever, it is simply textures on a mesh which is why it looks flat or 'quake 2' ish. I intend to work on materials later on.

No assets were used, textures from cgtextures - whether or not they are free to use on github I don't know.

https://www.textures.com/faq-license.html

 

HDRP will work with macs which have strong metal support + vulkan devices.

 

Cool, I was err fixing? Stuff anyway, wanted to test it with different times of day but here it is..

I used HDRP, converted all the mats / used post process stack V2.. For the darker scene it was interesting trying to get multiple different light shadings, for the most part I had to fake a lot of it with AO and pointlights. I'd say Unity is more realsitic in this regard as "in HDRP" at least it floods light quite well and occludes where necessary (due to actual measurement responses and square inverse).

Unreal has a somewhat flair for the dramatic, but the contrasts do happen in real life..

If you could smush them both together you would have the perfect rendering / lighting solution..

Where the walls change colour I'm using Unity's real-time area lights. I didn't take to PLM, everything was either too dark in some places / too light in others or it just looked plain odd. Enlighten to the rescue, settings shown below:

@Martin_H..

Actually no, you use a post process material called an "unsharpen" / sharp mask to make it "crisper" you can also do it to a certain extent with LUTS.. Of course you can also super sample, you have to remember they do use these live for customer viewing etc. so they have to look as good in motion (well to an extent)..

Also it's like arch viz in UE 101 ..



@neginfinity

Wireframe for yours truly..

 

I want that fidelity in my game!

 

Ha, if you want 300GB's worth of GI cache I'm sure you could do it ..

 

Of course, I use sharpen / unsharp mask post effects often myself. I was just speculating about what can be done in the small margin between "not lying about what the provided setup looks like", but still "improving the look through other means that are commonly not mentioned". I know some devs make the screenshots for their steam pages with unusually high resolutions and then scale down to 1080p so that it has a quality of "supersampling" that isn't possible in the actual game without some external hacks.
I thought if in the example it was done through ingame post, that effect would have been included in the files sold on gumroad.

Nice scene you did there, I like it! Only the light over the couch table looks somehow slightly too cold with too sharp of a shadow for me. Did you just stick a point light in there?

 

Yeah, thats a problem with high res lightmaps, disk space, and also GPU memory

 

In the first picture it's blended, I measured it off a real white halogen spotlight looking down and bar the shadows (which lets face it aren't incredible in Unity even baked) it's rather accurate for that specific time of day.. Although on the analysis screenshot it's not blended properly..

It's a spotlight..

 

There is no specularity? Baked lights only no mixed?

 

Specularity? You mean the shader right?

Mainly all baked (even directional), although you just reminded me I want to test it realtime ..

 

Yeah the Standard shader will not produce any specularity if you do not use mixed mode lights (or real time). Specularity is super important to get a realistic result

 

I took a quick pic from my apartment, even now with the fading evening sun it produces alot of specularity on the floor, and also on the door

 

I think I get what you mean, what you're after is screen space reflections and they aren't currently supported in the HD render pipeline. You could just up the roughness (or smoothness) but it looks a bit crap..

Although that being said it depends as well, you could have drywood floors and matt paint on your walls which neither are particularlity reflective.. My music studio is set up like that, it's a complete mare to clean anything off it though..

 

its two different things, reflection you get just by using PBR with a reflection probe or screen space reflection like you suggested, here is example from one of our scene, Thats PBR reflection only no specularity becasue only baked light. its hard to see, easier with a moving video, but look at the red arrow



Here is example of specularity from a mixed mode dir.light


Here is another example from a mixed mode spot light

 

It's funny. This would never ever be rendered as such in game/visualization. Normal map on the flooring would be dramatically exaggerated and the polish reduced.

It actually doesn't look real enough for most people's taste.

In game version: the surface would appear closer to the polished concrete in the last game shot, only with slight edging from the wood normals.

Either that..or maybe the picture is just slightly blurry. Lol

 

One thing I don't like with specularity in unity

is that you cant diffuse it, not that I know atleast, the specularity from a naked bulb has much more specularity like in my last shot than a lamp with a diffuser

Edit: my girlfriend likes to be barefoot home plus we have two small kids so the floor needs cleaning often, it's high time for that right now that's why the smudge makes the specularity looks like that

edit2: I found some pics from when the floor was new, thus no smudges, it gives another look to the specularity

 

It does look real, though.

And I've been seeing such effect recently, quite often. It apeared in epic's "infiltrator" (or whatever it is called) demo, and I saw something similar in... Ni No Kuni.

Spoiler

^^ Look under their feet.

 

^^^ This requires SSR or truckload of reflection probes. You won't really get this effect from lights.

 

Not the entire effect but the specularity part you get just by using a mixed mode light, or real time, but shadows from realtime are so, so, this is a mixed mode spotlight

 

Now, notice missing reflection of the window and sky in it.

 

The dir.light is baked only in that scene, I dont know how how it wouldl look with a mixed mode dir.light, but dir.lights do support specularity, this is specularity from dir.light