Epic Games announces an open beta of Unreal Studio

Cary, N.C. — Epic Games launched Unreal Studio as an open beta, providing customers in architecture, design and manufacturing a shortcut to producing high-quality, real-time, fully immersive visual experiences. Unreal Studio introduces new learning tools, professional support and assets, along with the Datasmith workflow toolkit for streamlining transfer of CAD and 3ds Max data into Unreal Engine.

“Real-time engines have primarily been designed for the gaming industry, making them impractical to use for architectural and manufacturing visualization. Until now. Unreal Studio changes the paradigm by addressing needs specific to our industry, such as importing engineering models and easily achieving visual consistency,” said Karen Hapner, Senior Visualization Designer at Herman Miller. “With Unreal Studio, I can use Unreal Engine to efficiently create interactive, immersive experiences for our customers.”

“The Unreal Studio open beta builds on the success of our Datasmith release. Datasmith simplifies bringing Unreal Engine into architecture and design pipelines with automatic lightmap and UV creation along with scripted workflows to organize, optimize and clean up geometry,” said Marc Petit, General Manager of Unreal Enterprise at Epic Games. “The feedback has been overwhelming — in just five months we had over 14,000 beta registrations, and a recent beta survey reported Datasmith productivity gains of 113 percent. We’re taking all the ‘boring’ work out of the process and giving users more time to be creative.”

Unreal Studio features

• Datasmith — After five months in beta, Datasmith has been production-proven by thousands of customers using it to efficiently transfer CAD data from over 20 CAD sources, including Autodesk 3ds Max, into Unreal Engine.
• Learning tools — Extensive tutorials include Unreal Engine fundamentals and industry-focused training materials, with updated content released on an ongoing basis.
• Assets — Includes 100 Substances from Allegorithmic for common architecture and design materials, and industry-specific templates to quickly create experiences.
• Support — The beta features a monitored community-driven discussion board and one-to-one ticketed support.

A recent independent rendering survey by CGarchitect of over 2,000 visualization experts revealed that Unreal Engine is the number one real-time solution used in architectural visualization; more than 20 percent of respondents are already using UE4 in production. The Unreal Studio open beta registration is available now. Sign-up entitles full access to Unreal Studio use for both educational and commercial purposes.

For more information, visit https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/studio.