For his graduation work Thomas Ghekiere had to recreate a scene from a photo/ real building in the game engine Unreal 4. The goal was to get the look as realistic as possible. With as purpose to create realistic PBR materials, utilize them in a scene and make use of lighting to set a coherent scene. The project served also as a case to convince people that unreal is capable of architectural visualisations.

 

What better subject to choose than our very own school: The Level.

Image made in Unreal

 

The real image.

His workflow:

 

- Searching for references on everything; scene, lighting, materials, textures, geometric meshes

 

- Create some of the first materials with the help of a basic mat. shader in ue4.

 

- Put those materials in a testscene.

 

- Keep creating the materials that are needed, make complexer materials ( tesselation, vertex paint)

 

- Creation of the final scene with the help of BSP brushes and props (trying to match composition with the references).

 

- Add the materials on BSP brushes in the created scene.

 

- Start adding lighting ( directional light, skylight, sphere reflectors, bounceing light)

 

- Add a post-process to the scene. Take control over bloom, ambient occlusion, saturation/contrast,...