Luxury Home with Benefits
The Context
New and growing Videography Studio.
Vaudeville Views, a videography studio founded by talented filmmakers specializing in marketing content for diverse businesses, was approached by a real estate company to produce promotional materials for their upcoming residential designs. During the initial consultation, the brokers expressed interest in possibly incorporating architectural visualization to enhance the client immersion experience.
Vaudeville Views contacted StillFrame 3D, presenting their situation and explaining their tight timeline of just a few months to develop an interactive presentation. Furthermore, they provided no existing architectural plans for reference, only a general style direction based on limited existing material. Consequently, we proceeded to design a completely new concept home within the very tight timeframe available.
The Concept
Given our small timeline, concurrent project commitments, and the interactive nature of the deliverable, we established a clear concept early in the development process to optimize efficiency. We maintained regular communication with the Vaudeville Views team and provided consistent updates on our progress throughout the project.
While its photorealism was not a primary requirement, Unreal Engine provided exceptional development speed, offering the flexibility to make real-time adjustments. To align with the real estate company’s aesthetic vision, we adopted a modern and luxurious design approach within the constraints of our available resources. As a 3D art studio, our typical workflow involves collaborating with professional architects to visually enhance their existing designs. Approximately doing the work of an architect and visualizing at the same time represented an unusual challenge.
Being a completely creative project with little source material, we decided to innovate a bit ourselves. Inspired by studies on the climate benefits of mixed use homes, we crafted a design that would:
- House a family of larger than 5, with space for an extra couple, similar to that of smaller generational homes. For our design we added 2 Master bedrooms and Bathrooms to the top floor.
- An empty mixed use space that for an office, or small shop. This would encourage decreased travel time and more smaller businesses in the neighborhood. The mixed use space has its own commercial parking lot.
- An excess of balcony and outdoor space for the family to enjoy, while giving an acceptable level of privacy.
- The luxury amenities included a swimming pool, an expansive backyard with a soccer goal, art installations throughout the residence, and a Japanese inspired Genkan style entryway for shoe removal. While this feature may be unfamiliar to most Americans, it resonates with many other cultural traditions. Although the Genkan concept does not exist in Arabic culture, the practice of removing footwear at the entrance is. So experimenting with the Genkan concept felt familiar in a way.
Modeling and USD Iteration
Due to the limited timeline, we segmented the home into distinct parts and blocked out each floor separately, ensuring correct measurements and compliance with local building codes despite being conceptual work. Repetitive architectural elements such as railings, doors, barriers, and stairs were manually constructed as modular components and optimized for game engine performance, then instanced through geometry nodes for automated placement and customization. This workflow proved very efficient, as we leveraged the Unreal USD importer’s ability to recognize Blender instances, enabling seamless iteration throughout the design process.
We constructed all primary architectural elements including doors, windows, lighting fixtures, cabinetry, outlets, and additional components. We also fabricated some of the furniture pieces. However, due to time constraints, we required access to an existing asset library to populate the home with additional items including more furniture, appliances, and more complex fixtures. We initially utilized BlenderKit, which offers an incredible asset library with numerous high-quality assets that are suitable for diverse animation projects. Unfortunately, most of these assets used procedural materials dependent on Blender’s node system, which resulted in objects imported into Unreal missing textures.
While these node systems can be recreated in Unreal Engine through its powerful Blueprints system, the limited time we had did not permit this. Additionally, many assets were not optimized for game engine performance. Instead, we transitioned to the Unreal Marketplace, where we found optimized, high-quality assets to populate our scene as well as scripts to speed up development of the interactive section of the demo. We also leveraged the Megascans library for the exterior environment and acquired tiling textures that users could switch between during the demo.
Results
Conclusion
Once again, another short deadline project was completed successfully. Despite the challenges, we thoroughly enjoyed the process due to the creative freedom, allowing us to design an experimental residence. While the mixed-use space remained partially complete and several aspects could have been further refined, the house demonstration effectively showcased the impact of interactive experiences in immersing potential clients in home design concepts.
Credits
Home Model and Half of the Assets
Basel Yousef
Character Artist
StillFrame 3D Studios
Video Presentation and Highlights
Nader Yousef
Video Editor
Vaudeville Views
Additional Assets Acquired From
BlenderKit Marketplace
Unreal Marketplace
SuperHive Marketplace
Quixel Megacsans
