Evaluating all the advantages of using a real-time engine like Unity compared to traditional offline rendering engines is essential for anyone working in the architecture and AEC industries.
Think about visualization in the architecture or interior design industry using Unity and by using a real-time engine for visualization it's often associated with virtual reality experiences while at the same time when we talk about still images and cinematic video we usually think of the engine as V-ray or Electric Halo rendering.
While this may be a practice in the architectural visualization industry as well as architecture and interior design studios, that doesn't mean it's always the best approach.
What advantages does Unity have over offline rendering engines?
The first one is render time
Taking an offline render engine image as an example, it can take up to 8 hours to render on a single computer. Obviously, as Unity's real-time engine, the image rendering speed is very fast.
If a few hours or even a day for a single image isn't a big deal, try considering the time it takes to render a realistic 3 minute video in full HD.
Considering at least 30 frames per second, this means that a 3-minute video consists of 5400 images. Now with just 10 minutes for image reference, we'll have about 37 days to render the video on one computer.
While this may seem obvious in terms of perspective, it's important to remember that a real-time approach can bring huge advantages, higher resolution, shorter render times, and also for more "classic" content like stills Images and video, this content is still the standard today.
This is why many architecture studios, and even rendering firms, avoid creating high-resolution photorealistic videos. However, it's not just a matter of time, it's also a matter of money.
Considering that no one can spend a month rendering video, this means that a render farm or similar hardware configuration has to be used, and while it reduces computation time, it greatly increases cost.
While the classic approach to architectural visualization by using offline rendering such as V-Ray, Corona or Octane requires paying for each content the client needs, our approach allows rendering in Ultra HD at 60 images per second by using Unity Even 5K video is very smooth. Plus, even still rendering costs next to nothing.
What if something needs to be changed? When modifying materials in real time, moving or changing furniture is very fast, and new images and videos can be obtained quickly without spending large sums to render what has been modified in the render farm.
Having concluded the topics related to the rendering speed of real-time engines like Unity for realistic content, let's move on to another important advantage of using a real-time engine over an offline rendering engine.
Creating content that increases prospect engagement is critical these days. Of course, it is also possible to use an offline rendering engine for some kind of interaction, such as creating a 360 Pano tour, but there are several disadvantages, for example, you have to render huge images that take hours, so the number of static points that the user can move is limited.
Instead, with Unity, any type of interaction can be added and there is more involvement between the client and the project. This is certainly a possible winning card.
Here you can see several possible interactions inside Unity, such as trying out different floor materials, switching between different daylights, turning TV and lights on/off, and accessing BIM information.
Why real-time cloud rendering may change the real-time rendering experience?
Compared with traditional offline rendering and real-time rendering , both rely heavily on local terminal computing power, but everyone knows that the laws of physics determine that super powerful computing power cannot be realized on very light terminals, so cloud rendering appears at this time
The 3DCAT real-time rendering cloud launched by Raycloud Technology is based on the concept of cloud computing, and deploys XR applications to run on the cloud. Cloud resources perform real-time calculation and output of graphics data, and push the running results to the terminal in the form of "Streaming" Presentation, end users can interactively access various XR applications anytime and anywhere, breaking the shackles of time and space, and enjoying the world of the Metaverse.
3DCAT puts very heavy graphics calculations on the cloud. The cloud server can be configured with a higher-end GPU device to perform calculations through the cloud server and perform real-time encoding. After encoding, it will be "streamed", and the calculation results will be pushed to the terminal in real time through the network. (such as mobile phones, PCs, tablets and XR devices).
The signal of any interactive action made by the user on the terminal (such as sliding the finger on the screen, clicking the mouse on the PC, etc.) is also transmitted to the cloud server in real time through the network. After receiving the signal, the cloud server sends back the calculation result through cloud computing. To the terminal, this process can be completed within 100 milliseconds when the network is good.
The cloud rendering of "emphasis on the cloud and light on the terminal" puts more graphics computing power and storage requirements on the cloud, and the terminal's requirements for graphics computing power and storage hardware configuration are greatly reduced, providing a basic SaaS for the lightweight and portable terminal interactive hardware At the same time, it also optimizes the manufacturing cost of terminal hardware, promotes the rapid penetration of consumer-grade hardware in the Metaverse, and further accelerates the popularization of Metaverse.
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