Realistic architectural visualizations using HPC resources

Partner: INFER WAY s.r.o.

FIELD: Architecture, civil engineering

INFER WAY focuses mainly on design activities in building design, public spaces, architectural and urban studies and interiors. The stages of project documentation include mainly architectural and urban studies and all other corresponding stages up to the implementation of buildings and interiors. The project portfolio includes civil buildings, residential buildings, single-family houses and various interiors.

The cooperation with the National Competence Centre in HPC aimed to create and verify suitable procedures for processing input architectural data to generate visually attractive outputs. In particular, it was about the possibility of modifying and further completing the 3D scene to be able to generate video footage in photorealistic quality. Furthermore, the aim was to design procedures and modifications to the scene to allow interactive scene exploration in VR while incorporating maximum visual quality. In both cases, a path trace rendering was used. This allowed us to achieve high visual quality. In the case of generated video footage, it was used to render out all the frames. In the case of VR scenes, it was used to bake proper lighting into the image textures for object materials. To achieve fast and accurate render outputs the supercomputers have been utilized.

Our solution uses a complete open-source tool Blender, which allows for creating and modifying 3D content, including the parameterization of the scene. A physically based photorealistic Cycles renderer was used to transform the input data with architectural designs into interactive and highly realistic visualizations. For the rendering itself, our own Blender extension was used, thanks to which it is possible to make maximum use of the latest supercomputers and thus speed up the whole process considerably. As a result, a processing pipeline that provides either interactive visualization in VR with realistically rendered light and shadows or completely photorealistic videos from the 3D design has been suggested and tested.