Hey guys,

Just wanted to share an update on the Med Drone project. I'm now building a VR set for it in Unity. For those of you interested, the below image are from the VR scene I'm creating and the workflow went like this:

1. Create base model in MoI
2. Export to SketchUp where lots of details and tweaking occurs. Because Unity prefers lower numbers of polys, adding small details (screw heads, switches, ports, etc) works better in SketchUp where you can control the number of polys. Plus, SketchUp has Components which can actually cut holes in surfaces. So, if you create a Componet with a single recessed hole with a screw in it, it will automatically recess itself when you drag it onto an object. Plus you can drag as many of them on an object as you like-- doing it this way takes virtually no memory in either SU or Unity other than the first instance
3. Save SU file (as SU2015) to Unity Asset folder
4. Load into Unity, apply textures and render

Notice this pipeline did not include the PBR 3D Coat mapping and texturing process. There was zero UV mapping done in SketchUp (other than to add a 'texture' to every object-- this gives a very 'basic' UV mapping which then allows it to be changed in Unity. If you don't do this, you can't apply textures in Unity). Interestingly, the brick and the wall textures are default SketchUp textures. I duplicated the image and used it as a normal map.

The latest version of Unity, 5.6, has a really cool progressive renderer (baker) built in. With it you can see the scene take place as it builds it's lighting model, not unlike KeyShot and other progressive renderers.

This is a great solution for those who don't have the money to buy KeyShot but still want photoreal rendering. The images below baked for over 3 hours, but once done, allowed me to move around the scene in realtime (using my mouse OR in VR) and "snap" pictures. Each picture was captured as an 8K PNG and then I resized them to what you see here (1280 x 720 JPG) to fit on the web. Just a press of the button and the rendering takes only as long as it takes to write the 65Mb PNG to the disk. Pretty cool. I'll create an animation as soon as I figure out how! :-)

I'm pretty sure once I add in PBR textures and mappings, this will only get better.

To that end, has anyone any experience with Quixel Suite 2.0? I'm liking what I see there. Plus it runs directly in Pshop and has a slew of textures to start with.