Unreal Engine and Cloud Rendering in the Real Estate Industry

Creating photorealistic designs of products related to the real estate sector has always been the holy grail for many home developers. This is key to marketing and creating a next-gen experience for potential home buyers. Many technologies are utilized for this task but they encounter problems with getting the proper I.T. infrastructure that can process large amounts of design data to create the required visualizations at the required time and with minimal cost.

Unreal engine, one of these technologies that has been used by both game and film studios to render high-quality 3D animations for decades, is now used by developers in the real estate industry.

Unfortunately, running unreal engines also requires powerful and expensive I.T. infrastructures which many startups in the construction sector cannot afford.

This is why cloud rendering of unreal engine projects has the potential to contribute immense value in the construction and real estate industries. This cloud rendering is mainly achieved through render farms.

What excites me the most about unreal engine cloud rendering

The ability of home builders to create building models utilizing unreal engines, render them in the cloud, and provide breathtaking visualization to potential buyers without the need for sophisticated I.T. infrastructures.

Traditionally, when it came to selling houses, builders and real estate agents used pictures and animated tours. But now, there's a new and improved way to get people interested in buying

homes. For big housing projects, it's super important to sell houses before they are even built. To do that, developers need to show potential buyers something really exciting about the homes they are planning to build.

But with real-time technology like unreal engine and cloud rendering, companies can deliver high-quality visualizations, no matter where the customer is located or what hardware they are viewing the digital homes on.

Companies Utilizing unreal engine and cloud rendering to provide service to home developers

There are a couple of companies that are providing services to home developers utilizing unreal engine and some of them include:

Away Digital Home is a company in Australia that has been in the real estate sector for decades. It is a software platform that enables home buyers to walk around a photorealistic 3D model of their future home. Their platform utilizes pixel streaming technology and enables customers to select elevations, floor plan options, materials, and products, as they go while keeping track of the updates. This ensures that home buyers end up with their dream homes.

Another company is 3D estate, which also offers photorealistic visualization in the real estate sector. Powered by Unreal Engine, the company helps real estate developers to sell homes that are not built yet. 3D Estate’s platform creates interactive rotating 3D models and virtual tours of apartments for buyers to view and inspect. With the power of cloud rendering, it takes just five to seven minutes to complete the entire rendering process on a small flat and up to 15 minutes to render a larger property. Home developers can choose from a range of six set apartment styles, then a simple interface enables them to add the 3D models to their website.

It also provides an interactive web tool that enables buyers to search for apartments using criteria, such as square footage or number of bedrooms, and then wander around the virtual developments before they are built. The app works on any device, from smartphones and laptops to 8K showroom screens and VR headsets.

As GPU and CPU Get better, cloud rendering will also get better

Products like I-render cloud GPU and CPU will continue to get better thanks to Moore's law, which, in this context, implies that the speed and capability of our computer processors will increase every two years because the number of transistors on a microchip doubles every two years, making our computers smaller and faster.

The economic impact of this law is that as these computing devices continue to show exponential growth in complexity and computing power, there will be a proportional reduction in the cost of manufacturing these devices.

These boosts in computing power will reduce the time and cost relating to cloud rendering of unreal engine projects.

Why cloud rendering of unreal engine projects  is needed in the real estate sector

Often, potential home buyers will have to make a wide variety of decisions on their home-buying journey. Each decision can take time, and without the ability to visualize options, can create confusion. Then once made, a selection might be outside of the buyer’s budget, causing them to start that process over.

Potential benefits of render farms

Real estate customers will benefit from this because they will have the power of making early-stage decisions; as they get to see proposed projects on a realistically rendered scale before they’re actually built, helping them decide on whether to make a purchase.

Not only will this technology enhance customer journeys by facilitating real-time interaction with digital homes, leading to increased sales, but it will also shorten the delivery process for the home builder and enable them to test new designs before building or bringing them to market.

Potential negative impacts of render farms

Data theft can be the biggest problem when using render farms. Malicious hackers can easily exploit weaknesses in the render farm's security to steal important data like project files and information that might be classified to the company. The consequences of this can be severe and will affect businesses and people’s lives.

Predictions on how cloud rendering in real estate will evolve

With the emergence of technology like the Apple Vision Pro, more real estate companies will utilize this opportunity to render projects in the cloud and present the results wherever a prospective client is located around the world.

How society will want this technology to be used

I believe that more people will join the conversation about transparency in the construction sector, especially in Africa. People will demand a BIM approach to every public and private construction project. This way, they can be assured that every amount spent at the initial stage is worth it and can be easily tracked. And for this to occur people must be able to visualize projects realistically at the early stage. Unreal engine cloud rendering can be a key technology for government agencies and companies to use for faster rendering of proposed projects without the need for much I.T. infrastructure.