mrcamper

PRESS RELEASE
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE October 9, 2007



HKS LICENSES UNREAL(r) ENGINE 3 FOR
GROUNDBREAKING ARCHITECTURAL APPLICATIONS


DALLAS, TEXAS - HKS Architects, ranked among the nation's top five
architectural firms, announced a licensing agreement with Epic Games,
Inc. that will change the face of architectural design. Through the
agreement with the world's leading gaming developer, HKS adopts the
Unreal(r) Engine 3 for use in its architectural designs.
HKS ARCHengine, powered by Epic Games' Unreal Engine 3
technology, creates functional 3D visualizations of architectural space,
complete with moving figures, operational elevators, and running
escalators.
The use of the new technologies, along with its 3D graphic editor,
provides a powerful tool that allows the architect or client the ability
to walk around their space at their own speed, experiencing the virtual
building in detail.
"This next generation game technology incorporates real-time
shadows, lighting, and people into our architectural projects," said Pat
Carmichael, manager, advanced technologies, HKS, Inc. and co-founder of
HKS ARCHengine. "When designing a stadium, the client - meaning a
life-like version of the client and their families - is able to walk
into a stadium, order and eat a hot dog, and interact as they watch a
baseball game."
"HKS is the first architectural firm to apply Unreal Engine 3 technology
to its designs," said Ralph Hawkins, FAIA, FACHA, president and CEO of
HKS. "We are pleased to offer our clients with the sophisticated tools
contained in this unique program. Its versatility and strength allows
us to powerfully portray our designs to clients."
And, HKS's clients are taking them up on the new technology -
including the Dallas Cowboys and Gatehouse Development (developer of the
W hotels), at a cost that ranges from $65,000 to $150,000 per project
based on the project scope.
When Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones wanted to select the
location of his owner's suite, HKS ARCHengine allowed him to decide by
offering a 3D look at each and every view and vista at the new $1
billion Dallas Cowboys stadium.
Before spending $1 million on a condo unit, potential buyers at the W
Dallas-Victory Hotel and Residences were given a full tour of their
building - from the 30-story view from the glass balcony of the GhostBar
to the picturesque city views from each and every one of the units.
"Epic is extremely excited to be working with HKS," said Mark Rein, vice
president, Epic Games, Inc. "HKS has a long history of innovation and
leadership in the architectural industry and we're honored they've
chosen to use Unreal Engine 3."
Traditionally, the only way to communicate a design in its early
phase is to build scale models, refer to concept sketches, or spend days
creating 3D computer renderings using commercial 3D modeling and
rendering applications. These 3D renderings restrict what the viewer
can see, only generating single viewpoint renders or pre-determined
animated walkthroughs frame by frame.
"HKS ARCHengine offers clients a higher level of graphic photo realism,
communicating multiple design concepts rapidly and cost effectively,"
added Carmichael. "It renders 30 frames per second instead of one per
hour - that's 3,000 times faster than traditional animation methods.
This makes it a first (and only) in the architectural industry."

About HKS, Inc. - ARCHengine - www.archengine.org
[BTW We're interviewing architects/interns with game development/programming experience]

HKS, Inc. is a leading architectural design firm ranked among the
top-five architectural/engineering firms, according to Building Design &
Construction magazine. Since its founding in 1939, HKS has completed
construction projects totaling more than $39 billion in more than 758
cities located in 46 states, the District of Columbia, and 41 foreign
countries. Headquartered in Dallas, the firm has 19 U.S. and worldwide offices with
projects including the Dallas Cowboys Stadium (Dallas, Texas); W Dallas
Victory Hotel and Residences (Dallas, Texas); The Palazzo Casino &
Resort (Las Vegas, Nev.), RadioShack Corporate Campus (Fort Worth,
Texas); Children's Hospital and Regional Medical Center's Janet Sinegal
Patient Care Building (Seattle, Wash); Children's Healthcare of Atlanta
at Scottish Rite (Atlanta, Ga.); Whole Foods Market and Headquarters
(Austin, Texas); and the LEAR Corporation Headquarters (Southfield,
Mich).

About Epic Games, Inc.

Epic Games, Inc., based in Cary, NC and established in 1991, develops
cutting-edge games and game engine technology for PC and console. The
company has created multiple million-selling, award-winning titles in
their Unreal series and their latest game, Gears of War(r), broke sales
records on Xbox 360 selling more than 3 million copies worldwide in the
first ten weeks and awarded overall Game of the Year for 2006 by the
Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences, Game Developers Choice Awards,
GameSpot, GamePro and many others. Epic is also responsible for the
Unreal Engine, which is the underlying technology for a wide range of
games including, Console Game of the Year winner, "Tom Clancy's Splinter
Cell TM" by Ubi Soft; PC Gamer's Game of the Year, "Deus Ex" from Ion
Storm/Eidos; "America's Army: Special Forces," by the United States
Army, and "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" (PC) by Electronic
Arts. Epic's Unreal Engine 3 is the current holder, and three-time
consecutive winner, of Game Developer magazine's Front Line award for
Best Game Engine. Epic Games was also awarded Studio of the Year at the
2006 Spike TV Video Game Awards and Developer of the Year by Official
Xbox Magazine. Additional information about Epic can be obtained through
Epic's Web site at www.epicgames.com

* Unreal and Gears of War are trademarks or registered trademarks of
Epic Games, Inc. in the U.S. and/or other countries. All other
trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

__________________
A Noble life demands a noble architecture for noble uses of noble men. (FLLW, 1953) http://www.archengine.org - my Real Time blog - http://www.rtranger.com

aaron-cds

This sounds very cool but if the result is like the portfolio images on your website that's too bad. Those renderings look like they were done with scanline 10 years ago. What would it take to incorporate CG techniques that would make the result photorealistic? Is it a question of horsepower? The recent games for Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 are starting to become more photorealistic. Is it possible to do that with arch-viz VR? It's great that you can find clients to pay such a huge price for mediocre visualization. If that's the resulting image quality, I'm not impressed. A CG movie from Neoscape is what I would spend my money on.

__________________
Aaron Coon, Conceptual Design Studio

DavidR

I agree with Aaron -really unimpressive, and I think the utility is a bit confused -what I mean is: 1)for design exploration, you want something that allows on-the-fly changes with a serious database back-end to create a BOM, and all that not-so-fun stuff (a real configurator with menus, drag-n-drop textures, etc), but for impressive viz, you need 2)to either render stills/anim, or prepare assets for a realtime engine by baking, etc. The problem with option 2 is that you can't make changes to those prepared assets without going back and re-baking, so it allows realtime navigation but no modification. I don't think a game engine has any value unless the plan is option 2, otherwise, Bunkspeed, Eon, Virtools, Anark, and others cater to option 1. I've seen the same company do demos where project A shows off the configurator power, but looks like total crap, and project B has baked light/shadows etc, but nothing can be changed. People often think game stuff is all done in realtime, but it's not true (yet).

nicnic

I agree, I just cant get past the poor visual quality, until graphics catch up with games or 'conventional' animations I don't see any point, there is nothing alluring, informative or interesting about those images/environments.

Like Aaron said, would rather spend money on a neoscape animation that concentrates on showing the best parts of a building in a creative way rather than showing everything in a substandard manner.

mrcamper

I am reminded of an old MASH episode where Hawkeye told a joke about a circus performer that flapped his arms and flew around the big top.... the circus bossed then quipped, "that's it? bird tricks?"

It is true that the visuals arn't as compelling as stills and animations rendered out by the top end 3d applications. BUT at pushing over 15 million polygons (which BTW the complete model cannot even be opened in 3DS MAX but can be presented in Unreal), is very compelling to a client in that he can see every nook and cranny of his project from every view....

For us, it is all about design communication .....and the 3d visuals presented in the game engine communicate design in a unique and compelling way.

You can see the 15 million poly Dallas Cowboys Stadium model at http://www.businessweek.com/innovate...221_129534.htm

__________________
A Noble life demands a noble architecture for noble uses of noble men. (FLLW, 1953) http://www.archengine.org - my Real Time blog - http://www.rtranger.com

JamesTaylor

using techniques such as vray proxies allows us to render many more millions of poly than your stadium example, so it is entirely possible to show every nook and cranny a client would antto show.

the fact that your system is "real time" does provide benifits in that a particular view can be generated at will, but i don't feel that this benifit outweighs the lack of image quality.

Its good that someone is pushing this type of thing as without development it won't ever reach the required standard, but until you can say "real time" and deliver the quality of images we see produced by the top artists here i'm not sold by the hype you give it, and felt let down when i saw the folio images... but do look forward to oneday seeing images that blow my socks off!

BrianKitts

We quit counting counting polygons when we moved passed scanline and into global illumination. The new measure is quality, and to be honest I'm more impressed by high quality images by someone who's such an optimized modeler that polycount isn't even thought about. I could create a huge poly model..... doesn't mean it's anything impressive. And if your machines are struggling with 15m scenes, I would beat your IT dept over the head for a decent computer, specially with how well max2008 handles heavy polyscenes with it's adaptive viewport usage.

(now to jump on to your side)

It was wrong that everyone cut you down out of the gate on quality, the real focus should be it's impressive that you are taking the steps to increase interactivity and understanding with clients, so I commend you in your ambition to use a game engine for presentation purposes.

I would be curious to know what percentage of people on cgArchitect work as freelance and dedicated rendering companies versus being the renderering department for an architecture firm. IMO your images aren't half bad for an architecture firm, the bar has really been raised in the last couple of years and architecture firms are starting to get quality visualization from in-house as opposed to outsourcing. What I'm getting at is that the majority of criticism you are getting are from people who are really good at what they do and never get to see some of the REALLY BAD renderings coming out of architecture firms that get major projects and whose renderings actually impress the client.

I just started a new position in a large architectural firm as a visualization coordinator and the focus of my position is to raise the quality of the firms technology and knowledge for creating quality visualizations. Because to be honest, so far the stuff I've seen in house from our company (over 300 people) isn't anything I would post on here for fear of the backlash you recieved in the first couple of posts. (but we are working on it)

So good luck to you with the new engine, and keep posting with updates I'm sure many would like to see it. And make use of the forums for tips on raising that quality, because the realtime viewing with quality renders will be a extremely powerful client tool.


You will probably never see an architecture firm with a budget for a Neoscape (or likewise) production. Those are geared towards property developers with big pockets in the real-estate markets. We work on multi-million dollar projects, and although it would be great to have such a marketing piece, it's not worth the budget. We do primarily healthcare so I'll speak from my world.... it would be a bigger asset to allow the head of hospital explore his entire new million dollar project and workout any flaws before we actually break ground as opposed to blowing 40gs on a an amazing marketing piece.

You'd be amazed how far a great still image can go towards pulling in donors!

__________________
Brian Kitts
ANSHEN + ALLEN

mrcamper

Hey guys, thanks for the great input, in reference to some of the above comments here's some more info about what we do with our RT program.

In our RT 3D environment presentations we are required by our designers to keep everything operable, so polygons are necessary to open every door, window or whatever moves. The typical game engine Jedi texture tricks (normal maps, etc.) don't allow us to keep everything functional.... you cannot open a normal mapped window.

Over the last 11 years , in reference to RT being a useful tool, we are 93-2 (yes, I keep score) in winning the job over other firms when we use the real-time environments for presentation to potential clients as opposed to about 50-50 using traditional 3D animations coupled with power point slides and static images mounted on boards.

Also, it is not so much the speed of our machines (they are special order Alienware ALX, dual AMD 2 core CPUs, 16 gb ram, quad nvidia sli) it is the fact that we typically export the models from Automess' Revit and in the Cowboys Stadium's case it produced over 350,000 objects...

MAX cannot handle that many objects at one time no matter what hardware you throw at it as it is a limitation of the internal MAX object database. (now we have input into MAX over 40m poly environments, but in order to do so we have to collapse all the objects based on texture which messes up the file link to Revit for the 3D environment updates).

I would love to see more of what anyone else might be doing in architectural RT and would be glad to correspond with anyone interested.

__________________
A Noble life demands a noble architecture for noble uses of noble men. (FLLW, 1953) http://www.archengine.org - my Real Time blog - http://www.rtranger.com

BrianKitts

..... that's great I'll have to remember that one!

__________________
Brian Kitts
ANSHEN + ALLEN

mrcamper

yes, i have been using AutoDESK products since 1984 .... familiarity breeds contempt.

__________________
A Noble life demands a noble architecture for noble uses of noble men. (FLLW, 1953) http://www.archengine.org - my Real Time blog - http://www.rtranger.com