“Recently, we were able to produce a video, render the stills, and build a VR demo in less than two days!” “Our processing times improved so much, we could prepare a client demo in less than a week, when previously it took more than a month to build,” says Guillo. “It removed a massive weight off our shoulders,” he says, adding that the tool sped up import by up to 100x. When Datasmith for Revit was released earlier this year, it was love at first use for Guillo’s team. “We suggested to the Datasmith team that a Revit plugin might be a good idea, since a good number of BIM engineers and architects use it,” says Guillo. “From the beginning of the testing phases, we were hooked by the simplicity and effectiveness of Datasmith,” says Guillo.īut while Datasmith improved processing times, Guillo and his team wanted to take things a step further and go directly from Revit to Unreal, thus avoiding the conversion to 3ds Max in the middle. When Datasmith, a feature now included in Unreal Engine, was first released in March 2018, Guillo and his team started using it instead of FBX to import the 3ds Max files. While the image quality and client navigation tools in Unreal Engine worked out great on the client-facing end, the development process had its limitations-data-prep and cleanup were time-consuming, and the team had to gather BIM data in a spreadsheet and export it separately. They chose Unreal Engine for its image quality, Blueprint visual scripting, and ease of use.īefore Datasmith became available, Guillo and his team initially developed a pipeline where they exported Revit models to 3ds Max, then imported those scenes to UE4 using FBX and MAXScript. When they first started exploring real-time rendering for VR, Guilllo’s team experimented with a variety of solutions.

With the most recent updates to Datasmith, they can get clients immersed in these 3D experiences at an unprecedented speed, sometimes just a couple of days after starting the project. Guillo and his preconstruction team of around 15 designers and engineers have been creating VR, AR, and flat-screen visualizations for clients for several years. “Being able to discover their own projects in room-scale virtual reality is a unique experience for them, and so much more effective than 2D plans and drawings.”

“The majority of our clients aren’t building engineering experts, and most have never tried VR before,” says Antoine Guillo, Virtual Reality Designer at Groupe Legendre. The company has been a pioneer in the field of virtual reality for architectural visualization, showing their clients immersive representations early in the process to invite feedback and collaboration. Groupe Legendre is a major construction, real estate, and energy group with offices and projects across France, the UK, and Algeria.

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