Creating an archviz Unity animation.

[Karol.Osinski]

Hi guys!
We are starting our adventure with Unity in order to explore real-time rendering potential and see what we can do with it. We chose Unity for its wide support accross the industries, especially their newest AEC support such as Revit to Unity (Reflect) and AR capabilities. I know that high end graphics are more difficult to achieve in Unity than in UE. I am also fully aware about our beloved Lavina but as I've mentioned Unity has amazing flexibility we want to explore.

Do you guys have any experience switching from V-Ray to real time rendering? For now we are preparing all those dirty, high poly assets which obviously takes some time. I am interested of optimal polycount 2060 SUPER could swallow while maintaining 30fps.

Any tips are highly appreciated!

regards,
Karol

[Morne]

You can convert the VRay materials to Physical Materials, then Unity will pick up the materials and textures. Some things don't translate 100% from VRay to physical materials, so you may need to manually adjust things.

That being said, shader graph in Unity is very powerfull both for URP and HDRP. If you can, just use that to create your materials. Amplify Shaders (3rd party) is similar to shader graph, although it probably has some better nodes etc. Since raytracing and HDRP is still work in progress, Amplify is not always 100% compatible with the latest release.

As for polycount, I'ts good to keep it low, but I find it's not such a big deal as it use to be few years ago, so unless you're going to be outputting an app, don't worry too much about it.

Unity has recorder, that can work together with timeline, so FPS again not as a big a deal because if you use these 2 to output to image sequence or MP4, it has various settings so it will wait for a frame to complete if needed.

If you want to go the baking route, Bakery is pretty good (3rd party). But with raytracing, you dont need to bake unless you want to go hybrid. Raytracing has 3 modes, performance, quality and the 3rd pathtracing, which sort of supplements the 1st 2.

Will you be using Unity mainly for realtime animation and realtime offline rendering, or will you be creating apps also?

[Karol.Osinski]

Hi Mourne, thank you very much.
The way we approach the material conversion for now is we create a Stingray PBS material in Maya which with simple materials translates pretty well so far. It also speed up the process of copying all the textures into Unity so you don't need to copy them manually. I believe we can get away with keeping some simple materials as they are in PBS but more important ones I will definitely have to create directly inside Unity shader graph which I personally like.

For the polycount, if I would export my Maya scene as it is now it would be around 54 million polygons ...in fact I did it for laugh and Unity managed to swallow everything, the goal is to go down to 5 million polys (?). Some objects such as the main chandelier has 223k polys, I want to simplify its elements and bake the normals with Marmoset Toolbag which imo is the best baking software.

The goal is to create 30 fps offline animation in 4K and get the results as close as our V-Ray stills as possible.

I actually didn't know that Unity can offline render a frame if necessary, so I would be able to boost all the Ray tracing settings and just let it go for a night? That would be great.

Thanks again for your insights, I really appreciate it!