Unreal Architecture

Powerhouse Dallas architecture firm HKS is licensing a popular video game engine to wow potential clients

The new owners of the $1 billion Dallas Cowboys New Stadium could virtually tour the gridiron via animations made using the Unreal 3 game engine. HKS

by Matt Vella

Game-based models were also used to create personalized sales pitches for the $1 million condos at the W Dallas-Victory. HKS

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To boost profits and help sell its large-scale projects, architectural mega-firm HKS is turning to, of all things, video game technology. The Dallas group, whose clients include Whole Foods Market (WFMI), W Hotels (HOT), JCPenney (JCP), and the Ritz-Carlton, and whose projects in construction total $19.7 billion, announced in October, 2007, that it had licensed Unreal Engine 3, a powerful image processing tool that will help its architects produce detailed interactive environments of future projects.

Made by Raleigh (N.C.)-based Epic Games, Unreal Engine allows developers to cut down the time it takes to create complex graphics and game play. Over the past decade the technology has been used in the production of best sellers such as Gears of War and Mass Effect, churning out increasingly sophisticated polygonal images of all types, from futuristic space stations to hyper-realistic blood and guts. Applied to architectural models, it is helping HKS generate additional revenues of $65,000 to $150,000 per project.

The announcement comes as game technologies are making inroads into many industries (BusinessWeek.com, 12/21/07), and as the business of architectural visualization—the craft of creating preview images and animations of future buildings—undergoes a technological sea change. The artistic skill sets and software programs used to create hyper-detailed images for animated 3D films, next-generation video games, and now architecture, are bleeding together as clients expect more sophisticated visuals. According to Jeff Mottle, editor-in-chief of CGarchitect.com, a site dedicated to the subject, a number of other firms have already toyed with using gaming technology. But few game engines mock up structures that are large or sophisticated enough to make the effort worthwhile.

That's not the case at the high end of the market. There, says Mottle, "where it is really important to visualize many aspects of a complicated project on the fly, it could save time and cost by not having to create hundreds of sample images or animations." He adds that having access to this new technology "could give HKS a real competitive advantage."

Client POV

Adopting the new technology is also helping HKS address long-standing challenges. The firm had found that clients often have trouble translating two-dimensional images—let alone architectural plans—into accurate ideas of what a building or interior space might look like in reality. "The worst is when a client sees a finished building and says: 'That's not what I expected,'" says Pat Carmichael, the company's advanced technology manager and visualization guru.

Traditionally, projects were presented to clients in the form of a series of still images (which took hours to render) or as more sophisticated animations (which could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce). So in 1997, Carmichael began experimenting with then-nascent gaming technology, converting HKS projects into a free, basic version of the Unreal video game engine, and transferring 3D building models from architectural drafting programs to the game's engine. Mashing up games technology with complex architectural models made for results wholly unlike the company's existing approaches.

For Carmichael, the potential was clear. For one, clients can control the point of view with a joystick or keyboard, walking in and around buildings and structures as they would a finished building. Instead of depicting one sample room in a multistory building, HKS's game-based models show any room or area—and clients can navigate around in real time.