Real-time CAD Visualization with Unreal Studio

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CRAIG BARR: All right. Looks like they let you guys in. That's good news. I think we will get going, if everyone's OK with that. We're right on 8 o'clock. So let's stop this guy. Well, welcome to this morning's class. We're going to be doing an overview of Real-time CAD Visualization with Unreal Studio.

Before we jump in and I intro myself and we get going, how many people here are familiar with Unreal Engine? How many people have used it on a, let's say, weekly basis? OK, we got a few. So we have a lot of newbies here, right? That's great. This is going to give you a very solid overview of what Unreal Studio is about, what the technology is about, and where we're going with that tech.

So, if you've signed up, you're probably familiar with the learning objectives, but just really quickly, at the end of the day summarize all four of these. I want you to walk out of here and feel very comfortable with what Unreal Studio is, what the capabilities are, the power of real-time rendering with Unreal Engine, and where we're going with this. There's a lot of really exciting things in the works here.

So my name is Craig Barr. I'm kind of dating myself here but I've been in this industry for over 20 years now. I come from a visual effects background, TVs, TV production, commercial games development and production, different places all over the planet, and then as well as the software development side. So I actually worked with Autodesk on the M&E side, Media/Entertainment side development, with Maya, Mudbox, Motion Builder, a little bit on 3ds Max.

But the cool thing about working with a company like Autodesk is the exposure to all these different industries. So during that time I got to work with some pretty cool different areas, different-- the architectural, the engineering side. So all different ways that Media/Entertainment tools were blending with CAD tools. And we're really seeing that convergence now, especially with what we're doing at Epic with Unreal Engine.

So just a brief history of Unreal Engine. People have probably heard of Fortnite, so it's the same engine that I'm showing you today. You may have heard of Unreal Studio. I'll explain what that is. It's actually the exact same thing. It's Unreal Engine, the same Unreal Engine that's used to create all of the major AAA titles out there.

The great thing about the development team with Epic and Unreal Engine is it's been around for 20 years, developing this uber award winning real-time solution. Since then, we've evolved into different areas. So, obviously the history with Unreal Engine and Epic Games is games, but there has been a demand for the uses of real-time technology that Unreal Engine brings with this into different areas.

So that demand has driven the production or the development of a specialized team, this enterprise team, that we cater to all different industries. And you'll see here that we're really catering to-- it's kind of growing on an almost monthly basis-- all these different industries that want to use real-time technology for a variety of different needs.

So the platform history, just to go over this really quickly here. We go all the way back to, say, 1998 and right up to 2018 here. Starting out with some of the basics, developing for Windows and developing for Linux. And then eventually we added in MAC as a support platform in there.

And then coming forward here, of course, you can see that with everything that is developing in tech today, especially in the immersive realities, we have support for any kind of tool that comes out on that that kind of exciting curve of what's happening there. And virtual reality, augmented reality, extended reality, mixed reality, whatever the next reality is, we support that platform.

So you can see a couple of obvious ones up there, like Vive and Oculus, Magic Leap, and of course, things like HoloLens and all of that as well in there. And the great thing about the development here, anything new that comes, whether it's any kind of development platform, whether it's a desktop one or if it's something in the immersive realm of things, we support it because we have to. We have to support whatever the need is.

The great thing about what's going on now with Unreal Engine is-- of course I mentioned Fortnite over here, but we're now expanding into all of these different things here. Architectural, engineering, manufacturing, we can go on and on with that. And we'll look at more examples of that.

There's also another really cool thing happening with film and TV. There are a lot of television productions that have changed their offline rendering solution into a real-time live rendering solution direct to TV. And we're seeing that now with companies like Industrial Light and Magic and Disney using Unreal Engine live to film, for feature film, which is pretty blowing when you think about the old days.

I think I remember at one time standing there waiting for a render that was going to take maybe a couple of days and saying, one day I'll have kids and I'll tell my kids that we used to render things and they'll say, what was rendering? And we're kind of getting to that point now where what you see is what you get. It's getting very exciting.

So a summary of what we're doing with Unreal Engine now and where it's going now is-- we kind of started with this idea of building a platform to develop games for entertainment. And now we've branched out into all these different areas because, as Unreal Engine is, it's an immersive organic development platform. So this idea of building live content-- we'll look at some examples and there's some really cool things going on.

If you've watched the Weather Channel lately, where they have these really crazy amazing displays of a host standing in the middle of a flood or a hurricane, all of that is driven live by Unreal Engine. So we have the ability to have somebody live, interacting with digital content, running real-time right out of Unreal Engine, streaming to a broadcast.

And then of course, the interactive side, this idea of building content and building it into, either a standalone application or being able to work with it live within the editor in Unreal Engine. At the end of the day we want people to experience their designs. And a lot of that is what we're going to look at today. How we can take CAD, and not just make pretty pictures with it, that's very easy to do in Unreal Engine, stills or animations, but actually interact with their experience of that design.

And of course we get into the immersive side, whether it's VR or AR or all these different directions that immersive realities are going, as I mentioned, we support all those devices. And anything new that's coming along, we've got it in there to support. We have a couple of cool things we'll look at later.

Collaborative. So it's very easy to create multi-user experiences. If anyone has seen our announcement there last week, with our most recent update to Unreal Studio with 4.21, we now have the ability live on your desktop to have individuals remotely from around the world join into your workflow. So you're going to have people actually in your viewport, looking at your designs, whether they're on a desktop or in VR. So it's very cool that we can have somebody here and someone in Germany or someone in Japan, all at the same time. And more, it's a multi-user, it's up to your network and your hardware configuration there. You can have individuals and clients actually step inside your data and walk around and take a look at it and make comments, draw things within the viewport, and work collaboratively towards achieving your goal as to what it is you want to do with that real-time or that experiencing of the design.

And of course, connected, right? This idea of taking outside devices, sensors, trackers, we can support all of that. External devices, whether it's a headset in the immersive reality side, or even our most recent thing that we're doing now with a live production. We have the ability to support some high-end different cards and tech solutions, like AJA or Black Magic Cards directly into Unreal Engine to drive that live content there.

So where is a lot of this going? Well, it keeps growing and changing into different ways. But the bottom line is, we will always have support for all the legacy side of things. And that is, whether you want to create some beautiful imagery or maybe it's a beautiful video, you can output video directly out of Unreal Engine, or create interactive content or standalone applications. And of course, into those immersive realities, mixed reality, VR, AR, whatever it may be to be able to allow you to deliver content to experience that content in a different way.

We're going to look at some case studies here around immersive and collaborative spaces, and specifically some clients that are using Unreal Engine and some really interesting ways to further their design process. So this kind of sums up this idea. We talk a lot about the different formats-- and I will show a list here of all the different CAD formats that we're supporting-- but our end goal is that we really don't care where your data is coming from. And I mean that in the sense that at the end of the day, we want you to create anything, wherever, however you need to do it, and then bring it into Unreal Engine.

So that's what we're working hard to be able to do is support everything and anything so that you can create and not worry about getting it over there to take advantage of the real-time benefits of creating in Unreal Engine. So we'll look a lot today at the CAD side of things and all those different formats and tools. But I really do want to sum it up that is kind of the goal there is build and bring it in, and it should really be wherever your data comes into, bring it in and create whatever you need to create.

We can create beautiful high-resolution stills. Of course, you can create live commercials or videos out of there. We actually have a lot of studios doing live commercials right out of Unreal Engine. Cadillac actually uses it to visualize their cars and also they've actually built a really cool commercial directly with that as well. Creating interactive applications, whether it's a configurator of some sort, an architectural configuration or an automotive configuration. You may have seen our McClaren Auto Configurator. We have, at the booth on the floor, a Porsche demo using real-time ray tracing. That's not so much as a configurator as it is an experience of a vehicle.

And of course, events and point of sales. Speaking on the floor there, if you get a chance, at the back of the Unreal Engine booth is a Barco display where you can stand inside. If you haven't had a chance to take a look at that, that's a very interesting way to experience a virtual immersive sense of data. And then, of course, on that note, taking your data, doing all of this stuff, but then deciding, oh, we want to have this as a VR experience of our design or an AR experience of design, then you can carry that forward right into that at any time.

So really that's what this is about. It's about creating experiences and extending those assets so that they can be reused and multi-purpose. The old way of doing things, or other solutions, would be taking data, bring it in, do that one specific thing, and leave. And then if you wanted to do another thing, perhaps create a VR or an interactive experience, you would need to start again and bring that data in. Everything kind of ends. Our solution is more of an organic solution that allows you to create all of those things, at any time, back and forth, and continue forward with your development to whatever it is you may need to do to experience that design.

So I mentioned the Enterprise Team, or this development of this enterprise side of thing. And the great thing about the Enterprise Team is that it actually focuses on all the core business areas. Of course we have things like Evangelism, much of what we're doing down there on the show floor. We have an amazing, dedicated, support team, specifically to all of these different industries, catering to the needs of designers and architects and engineers, and whatever side of design it may come from. We also have focused on specific commercial applications, of course, marketing and development of tools and features for a specific industry, specific needs in there.

So let's now look at where this idea of data from other sources into Unreal Engine has come from. It's actually driven by architects, designers, engineers, the people out there using CAD design that said, all of the sudden we see they're trying to get this data into Unreal Engine over the last few years to use this to visualize everything real-time. And it was a very painful, very tedious, and expensive process.

And just to summarize that, typically CAD was built wherever, in CAD formats from whatever application it would be. And they needed to leave there, they had to export that data out of their application and go through a bunch of different hoops in order to bring that over. So something like a 3D content creation package, perhaps it was 3D Studio Max or Autodesk Maya or Cinema 4d or Blender or whatever it may be, to be able to do that translation of CAD data from a CAD surface into something that is real-time friendly or game engine friendly, something that they could tessalate, clean up geometry, translate that geometry into a polygonal sense that could be utilized in a real-time sense. And of course, that comes with the whole process of cleaning that data.

And then bringing that over into a process of laying out texture coordinates. That's actually an area there that we've, of course, we've seen that people from the CAD world, when they get to this point, they go UVs? What are you talking about? What is that? It's a different way of handling the coordinates of texture or the application of texture onto a mesh. So then, of course, you need the expertise to deal with that.

The other thing that happens in this old way of doing things is all of the loss of hierarchical structure, the organization of data, coming from the CAD package into another package, all of that history of that structure, the hierarchy, is lost. And of course you're kind of reorganizing that, converting all of that, going through that process of tessellation to make sure that it's going to be real-time friendly. And then you're exporting this again. So you've kind of lost things in translation here from CAD to export to export and then bringing this on an import process into Unreal Engine.

And at the time, we didn't really have the solution to deal with that data coming in properly, that might have come from somewhere else. And then, of course, everything needs to be reorganized and the scene rebuilt in Unreal. So you're kind of going through, pretty much, four different steps of redoing, of organizing, all of those things and dealing with that data just to get it into Unreal Engine. So we've had clients that have dealt with this and this used to take them weeks. In some cases, people that were doing massive data sets, it might have even been months to go through this translation process to get something that represented that properly.

Well, what we've done now, over the last couple of years, with Datasmith, our plug-in Datasmith-- you'll hear me use that term, Datasmith, and we'll look at what Datasmith specifically is-- is we've taken all those pain points and simply just done this idea here. We just want you to take your data, your CAD data, and bring it into Unreal. That's it. Get rid of all the pain points. And that really is what Datasmith is, it's all of that stuff in between.

So, the old way, right, it shouldn't matter where your data comes from, it shouldn't matter the application that you are using, and you want to bring it into Unreal Engine. So the old way, I just went through those pain points. But that's pretty much it, this idea of reducing polygons, translation, conversion, merging objects, making sure everything's welded together, UV layout, other areas that maybe people coming from the CAD world wouldn't be familiar with, and then using a format like FBX.

Now FBX is great for the basics of what FBX does in certain spaces, but you lose all of that support of things like metadata and hierarchical structure aned advanced lighting or materials and cameras, whatever it may be. We'll look at what the difference is here with Datasmith.

So the new way here with Datasmith. Again, doesn't matter where your data comes from, it shouldn't matter, bringing that over into Unreal Engine. So that little arrow right here kind of represents exactly this idea of where we're going with that, taking care of all those pain points for you. Export it, it takes care of all of it for you. It's optimizing it for Unreal Engine, for real-time performance. It's taking care of all those things, the translation, the tessellation.

And most importantly, though, in this is preserving the accuracy of that data. It's one thing to just have a solution and bring it in, but if it's not preserving the way that data was designed, the accuracy, the whole story is lost there. We need to make sure that it's accurate to the way it was built for engineering needs, architectural needs, whatever it may be, automotive needs. It needs to be accurate to that design. It needs to represent the space it's built in, the volume, and the accuracy of that data and there as well.

So by bringing all of that in there as well, the interesting thing about Datasmith Smith is that it is not a one time, go in one direction way. At any time, if any of the data changes back here, we can simply refresh or reinforce that with essentially, the Datasmith as a file format, works as a live connection into Datasmith. Anything that changes with that design, we can refresh and make sure that is it is up to date in Unreal Engine.

So it really is a non-destructive process with your data. It should never be, export your data, get into Unreal Engine, now you're trapped and you have to redo this again. It should be that you can change that design and have that reinport and update at anytime. And that's what Datasmith does for you there, as well.

So this idea here when we work with designers all over the world, and that really is what has driven, has built Datasmith as a plug-in, it's the individuals in all of those different spaces, all of those different industries telling us the pain points of what they're going through. So our dev team gets together and starts to look at what the solution needs to be. And the basics really are here.

We need to really, we need to take that data and import it and have all the translation done behind the scenes, the hierarchy preserved. We need to filter through things, make sure everything comes over and does what it has to do, which is this idea of working in a real time environment like Unreal Engine, but we want to make sure it preserves that accuracy.

So we need to take care of all of these areas, which get really complicated-- healing the mesh, fixing problems, filling holes, converting materials and textures, generating levels of detail. If you see that LOD, we'll see that throughout. You might wonder what that is. That's developing levels of detail.

So that we might have a very dense mesh up close, and as whatever it is that you're doing for that interactive environment or that visualization or that scene, as we move away from it, it essentially tessellates down into a lower resolution mesh, but preserving the accuracy of it. In the distance it looks like what it should do and it helps with the overall performance in there.

So this is kind of that really basic little thumbnail as to what's going on. All of these things have an enormous amount of work that's actually happening in there.

And you'll see at the bottom here, we'll talk about this a little bit later, but the idea of working with scripting. So we've added that. You don't have to work with it, but it's there.

If someone wants to customize how their data is coming in, this is where they can actually customize via script to bring their data in how they want it, in any way. If you're familiar with scripting, it's unlimited. You can define how that data should come in right down to literally the nut and bolt as to what that data is coming in.

So what does Datasmith do? Well, here's a really simple diagram of this. Datasmith takes your data from whatever source-- you know, we're looking at CAD here-- and we have this idea of fidelity to source, right? Preserving all of that accuracy. Bring your data in as you would expect it to be.

So taking things like texture maps, material shaders, the geometry, of course; lights, cameras. It goes beyond this. We now support things like metadata and different layers of important information that is stored on that CAD data to come live right into Unreal Engine.

So just kind of a bit of a summary as to what Datasmith and the concepts of things are, what it does do and what it doesn't quite do yet, or where we're at with that. And this is the great thing about Datasmith is it's in ongoing beta. It's developed in conjunction with everyone using it out there.

And it really, truly is. People put their feedback in, the team listens, and they implement it, they build it. And so with that, we're very transparent as to where we're at and what we're doing with this. And this is what has helped make it so successful with our customers out there is that the ability to add to this and work with it.

So right now we have the ability to convert and work with V-Ray assets. And actually, just as of last week we've furthered that with-- the KS group has actually announced full support of V-Ray into Unreal Engine, and they actually have a flavor of V-Ray that is for Unreal Engine.

So they have their own product there that you can actually buy V-Ray for Unreal Engine, which is very exciting for us because it's a good partnership with what they bring with their amazing software rendering capabilities and combined with what we do with real time in Unreal Engine there. But we also convert the assets to be used in an unreal environment, or for that matter, a real time environment.

So as of right now, you know, doesn't fix bad geometry. Well, the idea there is that when geometries coming into our plug-in, the complication is for software, for code to be able to understand what that geometry is and what it needs to do. You know, is that a hole or is that a feature on that mesh?

So when we get to things like doesn't fix bad geometry, there are a lot of things that, in the tessellation, the plug-in will kind of beautify or make very simple to bring it over. But when it gets to complicated areas like that example there, what is that feature, is that a feature, the last thing we want to do is be destructive. So if there's something that is on that mesh in that way, it needs to come over that way. So that's why that term there, you know, we don't fix bad geometry, well, that's kind of in that realm of where we're going with that. And there's more coming with that. There's a lot more geometry tools in the works.

So fixing bad UVs. Well, what that is, again, that's another complicated matter, is we need to have UVs to come into a real time situation. It doesn't matter what you're using. With Unreal Engine, we need to have UVs for two basic senses. We need to have UVs for texture placement, but we also need it for a process called light baking.

So what our process does is make sure that everything does have these UVs. Typically, CAD data won't have UVs, so our process Datasmith will actually make sure that everything has an automated UV layout on it. So UVs are on everything so that it is real-time friendly in that way for light maps and textures.

But this idea of it won't fix bad UVs, in the sense that, if there are UVs already existing on that, it will appreciate that if you want it to, and bring it over. And it's certainly not going to relay out your UVs for you. That's actually up to the user at the end. Now, there's more coming with that in the future. That I probably can't talk about too much, but there's a lot coming in that UV realm of things there to help with data translation.

So we certainly aren't going to say that we're going to render one-to-one compared to V-Ray. I should maybe put a comma, "yet," but with all due respect to those guys, their rendering is amazing. So in our process here of bringing over a V-Ray setup, there's a number of stories there. One is that we have a lot of designers-- architects, for example-- that will take their data and go into something like 3ds Max to build beautiful imagery.

And they'll set it up with V-Ray. They'll have their V-Ray lights, their V-Ray materials. They'll have it set up the way they want it, they'll make their beautiful images, and then their client will say, that's awesome, but I need to have an interaction with the data. I want a VR version of this. Well, uh-oh, how do we do that now? We just spent all this time in V-Ray.

So we support that setup, to bring that setup over into Unreal Engine, translate all that time spent on the where the lights are, where the cameras or the V-Ray materials. And as of last week, we now have a more robust support of V-Ray materials to bring what you would expect them to look like right over into Unreal Engine. And this idea of automagically reduce polygons-- well, we actually have a solution in there now that will allow you to customize how you want your tessellation or your decimation to happen with geometry.

And the great thing about that is you're not-- it's not a one-time click and you're done with it. You can go back and re-tessellate right down to the specific object level at any time within Unreal Engine. So we do have that ability to customize how dense or how low-res you want the geometry at any time. So here's just a nice little graphic. You may have seen this around on our website here.

But this idea of Unreal Studio-- again, I like to not focus on the file formats here, but we'll look at specifically the file formats here in a moment. But as of last week, we have full Revit support that we've announced, where we are able to use our plugin in live out of Revit and bring that entire data set over, including metadata and including all of the materials as you would expect them to be in Revit, and then bring that right over into Unreal Engine. And our plug-in Datasmith is taking care of everything in between.

So Datasmith-- what's going on, and a little bit more of the specifics here. So geometry translation-- well, we translate all the objects, any instances in there. What I mean by that is, if we have, say for example, several rivets, or maybe thousands of different rivets on an object, Datasmith is smart enough to recognize that those are the same objects. And it would create one object, and create instances out of those objects to save on performance in Live and Unreal, and also to make sure that everything isn't as dense as bogged down with geometry.

Of course, it preserves the location of everything-- [INAUDIBLE] locations of the rig of certain aspects of things. And of course, UV coordinates will come over as if they are set up somewhere else, or we'll generate automatic UVs for that, as well. So we import workflows. We have that and the ability to just to simply right-click and reimport or refresh geometry, and there's more coming on that as we go with every release of that-- of Datasmith.

So material translation-- I mentioned some of the materials coming over for something like Revit. We have a couple of other things that we've added as of last week, as well. A more robust support, as I mentioned, for materials like V-Ray materials, other renderers, like Corona. It's interesting to note here, the way Unreal works is that we will support materials coming from those applications.

We'll also support texture formats. They're conformed to Unreal Engine, meaning that Datasmith is smart enough to recognize what that texture is supposed to be, and we translate it into a format that preserves the way you expect that not to be to work properly with an Unreal Engine. And the math behind that is that we make sure that our textures are sitting at the power of 2.

And what I mean by that-- if a texture map is 2,048 by 1,900 and something, it will square it out to 2,048 by 2,048. It makes it more efficient in the calculation of real-time processes there. Any bump maps are automatically converted to normal maps, which is a much better, more efficient process in real time. So Datasmith is smart enough to recognize that. And of course, I mentioned the textures are resized to the power of 2, and materials are still on progress, like everything else.

We're always adding more, making it more robust. As of last week with the-- we now support 3ds Max material graphs directly from Max over into Unreal Engine, which is interesting and exciting, as well. So what about lights and cameras? Well, we support cameras coming over to Datasmith. We're getting into more animation on cameras, as well, in the development of Datasmith.

And of course, lights-- I mentioned our support for V-Ray-- so photometrics, right down to the basics of where that light position is, down to the intensity and certain parameters or settings of whatever that light setup may be to bring it over. So as ugly as this slide is, this is literally just from the website and I didn't bother making it pretty because it simply is from the website that we add to, we're constantly adding to.

So supported CAD formats that is there and [INAUDIBLE] growing. So I mentioned our most latest one-- we've had Revit support for some time, but now it is a full support into Unreal Engine. But this is important to point out this workflow type. So you'll see this mention of direct and you'll see export plugin. And the difference there is this, that we have-- when I get into real here live in a moment, I'll show you this-- but we do have the ability to bring in our format, which is .udatasmith format.

And that actually works as an external plug-in, an export plug-in with certain applications. So you can see here, 3ds Max, for example, uses our export plug-in, our Datasmith plug-in. That makes that .udatasmith file format. VRED as well-- Revit, CityEngine, Trimble, SketchUp. And what that is is that free plug-ins-- you simply install it. You click, it's installed into your package there.

And it's available in your export menu, and that brings up any kind of options. It's very simple, very straightforward, and it exports out that .udatasmith. Now, what's happening there is it's doing all the translation at time of export directly from the package. Where we see direct up here and we see the importer as CAD. That's what I like to call the raw CAD data import.

So we can actually just simply import all these different formats live into Unreal Engine. So an example there is wire format, CAD DWG formats. Whatever it may be, that is just simply clicking and importing CAD as you would expect it to be, right into Unreal Engine. And live with an Unreal Engine, there is the settings that you can determine how you want that to be tessellated. Or if you want materials, textures, lights, cameras, whatever it may be, you can say yes or no. You can always come back and adjust that later, even after import as well, depending on what it is you want to do with this.

So this is an interesting quote. Here's a great quote here from Carlos from Neoscape. "With Datasmith, I literally can do the same thing I did in four weeks in one day, and that is magic." And we have customers, as I mentioned, that take it beyond weeks, that have had things that were very costly time-wise and sanity-wise-- and also financially-- to translate the data that took so much time, and they can literally do now in hours.

Or even maybe if it's a massive data set, perhaps maybe it takes a little longer than a day. But the difference in time savings is massive, but also the difference in the quality as to what you get. It should be what you expect it to be coming over there. So Unreal Engine overview here-- just really quickly before I jump into Unreal Engine.

There's a lot of people in here that aren't familiar with Unreal Engine. So I'm not going to dive into all the specifics, but I just want to do a quick overview of the environment of Unreal and how we work with that. So really quickly, Unreal Engine works in this idea of editors. And you'll see that when I jump in Unreal, but we'll also see that in some of these slides here.

We work with this sense of editors, that this is our basic UI right here, but everything that we want to do, when we work with meshes or whatever, we'll add another tab, or you can rip it off and make it its own window-- whatever it may be-- that we work with as its own editor. So that might be a material editor or it might be a mesh editor-- whatever it may be that is catered specifically to that need.

So we have a number of different editors that do everything from visual effects, to mesh editing, to material editing, texture editing-- whatever it may be that you need to do, it works as its own editor within Unreal Engine. So Modes tab-- this idea here of the modes on the left, when you open up Unreal Engine, you'll see this. And this is where your starting points are, or what we also call actors. And this is where you take something you're placed in and a scene.

An actor's anything that you're going to place in the scene in Unreal. That could be lights or primitive geometry. It could be cameras. It could be some sort of volume to give you a rendering effect within the viewport. The Details panel-- if you're familiar with any-- well, really any CAD package, or Maya, or Max, or whatever it may be-- this idea of an outliner which sits right here above our details.

And this is the stack of everything. This is our hierarchy. This is where all of our geometry and our objects are stored. And right below that, in the standard, traditional, default UI, is this details panel. If you're familiar with all those different packages I mentioned there, you'd be familiar with this. This is where all your attributes are-- your transformation attributes-- anything related specifically to that object and their materials.

It could be how you're going to render that. Levels of detail, whatever it may be, it's all stacked into that simple little details pane there. The World Outliner, as I mentioned, that is where your hierarchy or your structure is going to exist. When we bring things over with Datasmith, it automatically builds that hierarchy. And we'll look at that here in a moment. It builds that hierarchy in the outliner here, and it preserves that structure, as you would expect it to be coming from your package or choice.

The Content Browser, this kind of really is the heart of a project-based platform like Unreal Engine. All of the content that comes in here, whether you do it through your operating system or if you do it through Unreal, it puts it into that project structure there, and it is there. It lives within the project that we can pull upon at any time. Unreal will actually treat all objects as its own asset. So it will translate everything to work in the world of Unreal so that we get the proper performance, and everything that you expect to work the way you want it to work is stored in that project structure and project directory.

And in the UI, we typically see this in the default UI layout down in the bottom left corner here. It really is a dominant structure down in the bottom left. And we have another little hierarchical structure that lets you look at a branch view structure of the content browser, or simply by folders or icons.

I mentioned this idea of actors. They really are anything that's used in Unreal Engine, and that can be meshes, it could be sounds, or textures, or materials. Essentially, any component or any object that's in Unreal is an actor. So you'll see that term-- when you jump in Unreal, you'll hear the term actors in there.

So I mentioned editors. This is an example of an editor here, and we're going to look at that. I'm going to show you the Static Mesh Editor really quickly here. And this is where we can take the object, whatever it is, and we look at it in its pure sense of just the geometry. We can look at its wireframe, we can work with its UV structure, and we can edit that mesh, as well. And we'll jump into that momentarily here.

Sequencer is a very powerful way to create beautiful images, beautiful visualizations, beautiful video right within Unreal Engine. And the interesting thing about this is probably the easiest way to explain some of that's never heard of Sequencer or seen it before is, if you're familiar with something like maybe Premiere Pro, you have that ability to create a video and edit it on a timeline much like that.

But Sequencer's much more powerful than that. It's not just a 2D image sense. Everything that is going on right here in this editor is live, real time within the report. So you if you take the power of that and the ability to create a film or an interactive experience, much like you would edit a 2D film or a 2D video, this is the ability to create immersive or interactive experiences in that editing-- that simple, quick editing format. So it's a very powerful way to work.

So just the basics of Sequencer here. We have this idea of a timeline, the ability to work with advanced cameras, cameras set to a cinematography sense, building a film, or interactive experience, or something that you could use to build into a VR experience. It's really more powerful than a simple film editor for that sense there.

So just some other modes here-- I just wanted to quickly point this out that unreal isn't just a place you just bring data in. You can create data in here. So we have a bunch of different tools in there that allow you to very rapidly create a landscape for where you're going to place something within the scene. Of course, foliage tools in here so that we can bring in trees, or plants, or grasses, or shrubs-- whatever it may be. And we support many external developers of that. SpeedTree is an example that builds libraries of realistic trees based off real species that you may require for your scene, whatever it may be.

Lighting, of course, works in the same way as what I mentioned with these actors here, these modes. We simply work with the basic of the four basic lights-- a directional, a point, a spotlight, and a skylight-- to be able to very quickly get you into visualizing or seeing your scene as you would expect it to be in there. The great thing about the lighting in the environment of Unreal Engine is that we support IES profiles. Very cool thing.

If you're not familiar with what that is, it's this idea here of shaping lights, or actually producing a lighting effect on here. This is an example of Pixar RenderMan's community of-- library of IES lights. But even cooler than that is that we have clients that work with architectural projects or engineering projects, and they need to know specifically that light that's sitting in this room-- what light bulb that is, what ballast that is, whatever it may be.

And they can grab that profile from the manufacturer's site and put it right in Unreal Engine to emulate that light shape and that lighting effect. So someone like GE Lighting for example, actually has their profiles on their website. You can actually go and find those profiles, and bring them right into Unreal Engine.

So with Unreal Studio, which we'll look at a bit more here in a second here-- Unreal Studio really is Unreal Engine with Datasmith promoted or Datasmith available in there. So it's the same engine, as we'll see, but we have this ability to work with the CAD data, or data coming from all these different sources via the Datasmith plug-in-- whether it's that exporter or directly into Unreal.

So with Unreal Studio-- which is free, just like Unreal Engine is free-- you get a bunch of free materials. And the guys over at Substance were generous enough to throw a bunch of free materials in there to help get you started. There's a library of materials that are really built around more of an architectural or engineering type of thing-- concretes, and wood, and there are even some fabrics in there, as well. And you can work with those and edit them to your needs within your scenes.

And of course, Unreal Engine actually is a really powerful material editor. It's incredibly powerful to be able to customize and do whatever it is you need to make your scene as beautiful as it needs to be. It supports everything from beautiful materials all the way up to visual effects within those materials. Unreal Engine works on the principle of this idea of PBR, or physically-based rendering.

So our materials really are based off of the real physical world. So we'll get a lot of architects that will bring stuff in from Revit, or maybe it's SketchUp, or Inventor, or whatever it may be, and I'll have materials on them. And those materials are great for what they need in their package in the viewport, but they're not really what represents the real world. You're not essentially going to get something that looks like this carpet, or these walls, or these ceilings. And that's where our materials come in. We always recommend you convert or update those materials into something more powerful, using our materials to bring that real-world sensor feel to it.