Founded in 1804, the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) is the UK’s leading gardening charity. It promotes horticulture through flower shows and by sponsoring gardening projects throughout the UK.

The RHS is currently involved in a project to transform the grounds at Worsley New Hall—a historic 19th-century mansion in the heart of Salford—into a new 154-acre garden. Due to open in the spring of 2021, the £30 million-plus site has been designed by renowned landscape architect Tom Stuart-Smith and will be one of the largest gardens in Europe.

The University of Salford’s THINKlab was asked to help visualize the new site as part of the initial planning process. The team there created a VR model of three sections of the RHS Bridgewater Garden including the Orchard Garden, Community Garden, and Kitchen Garden.

“With the garden yet to be completed, the VR work has been invaluable, allowing us to experience it ahead of time,” says Richard Green, Head of RHS Garden Bridgewater. “We’ve been able to walk around the virtual Orchard Garden of the future, to see the grasses swaying and hear the birds singing, to see the fruit trees matured in 10 years’ time, and also to experience the garden through the seasons.”

A fast and easy-to-learn visualization tool

THINKlab is part of the University of Salford’s School of Science, Engineering & Environment (SEE). It drives research across a number of fields including ICT platforms for urban regeneration, engineering, and smart city applications, with a strong emphasis on industry and interdisciplinary collaboration.

Dr Simon Campion is a VR project manager at THINKlab and looks after the commercial VR projects it undertakes for industry partners, as well as across the wider University. His team has been using Unreal Engine on visualization projects since the release of UE4.

In 2019, Campion and his team stumbled upon a news article about Twinmotion and decided to try out the platform. “We were not disappointed,” he recalls. “For projects which require pure visualization without the need for complex interactions, it’s an extremely quick solution.” 

The team set about learning the new software and were taken aback with how quickly they could get to grips with it. “I can honestly say it’s an extremely easy application to learn,” says Campion. “Within minutes I was exploring a scene and after a couple of hours I was setting up more complex scenes and playing with additional advanced settings. This was without looking at a tutorial, illustrating how simple it to understand the user interface.”

Having grown comfortable creating visualizations using the software, Campion’s team was soon to put Twinmotion through its paces on the large-scale landscaping project for RHS. 

RHS Garden Bridgewater in immersive VR

The centerpiece of RHS Garden Bridgewater is the 11-acre Weston Walled Garden, one of the UK’s biggest, measuring the size of six soccer pitches and comprising 11 individual gardens.

THINKlab visualized the buildings within the environment using a combination of photogrammetry, 3D sculpting, and standard 3D modelling techniques, before plants and trees were added in Twinmotion to complete the VR experience.

The team quickly started seeing an ROI benefit from using the tool. Traditionally, it has found that creating detailed outdoor scenes with large amounts of foliage requires the purchase of multiple assets and the sparing application of their use—particularly for virtual reality environments where too many assets being used might result in a reduction of frame rate.

What’s more, depending on the asset, it might previously have been necessary to create level-of-detail models for them. “This additional work would have been problematic, because time spent on optimization of scenes would drive up project complexity and therefore costs,” explains Campion. “It was very satisfying for us to be able to work on this project and not worry about any of this, because it was all being handled by Twinmotion seamlessly in the background.”

Not having to get involved in processes like this has freed up time for creative and technical challenges. “The speed with which it is possible to put a scene together in Twinmotion and the simplicity of its drag-and-drop system for assets gives creative developers and artists more time to work on content creation, scene dressing, and composition,” says Campion. “It also frees our programmers from working on technically straightforward visualization projects, allowing them to focus on more challenging development interests.”

The VR model enables the RHS to experience the space and new garden designs from any angle, at any time of day, and even through the seasons. The work will be used as a discussion piece for engaging with key stakeholders about the design, in addition to marketing the gardens. 

Less time coding, more time being creative 

With less time spent thinking behind the scenes, the team at THINKlab are now able to concentrate on other things. On the RHS Bridgewater Garden project, the time saved was put towards creating custom photogrammetry assets. “Standard visualization can be achieved without the need for any coding, and this allows more effort to be applied to the creation of environments,” says Campion. “There is also a reduction in rendering time, and the VR functionality works out of the box.”

Campion has also begun exploring novel ways to leverage Twinmotion, using it in parallel with Unreal Engine. “I’ve really enjoyed taking models that will eventually be used in Unreal Engine and dropping them into Twinmotion to evaluate them, identify errors, fix them in a modelling package, and then refresh the model within Twinmotion,” he says. “I’ve found this a nice way to quickly evaluate and identify any issues before handing models to programmers.”

Campion goes on to say that additional benefits he’s seen include the ability to demonstrate day and night cycles, set up lighting from a specific geolocation, and change the weather and seasons. “The addition of a time element for tree growth in Twinmotion 2020 is fantastic, enabling users to develop an understanding of how vistas might change over time,” he concludes. 

Real-time visualization for AEC

Having experienced the ease of creating visualizations with Twinmotion firsthand, Campion is looking forward to putting the tools to use on future projects. “The simplicity of lighting and rendering your scene make it a fantastic tool for very quickly setting up professional 2D renders, 360° renders, and VR output,” he says. “If you work in AEC with BIM or CAD data and are interested in real-time visualization, Twinmotion is a fantastic addition to your toolkit.”

Thank you to Twinmotion who ran this article on 22 July 2020.

Read more about the digital work with industry partners.

The University of Salford’s THINKlab has designed and developed a UE4-powered 4D simulation tool which can help dramatically improve Network Rail’s track renewal programs.

The UK’s railways carry about four million people a day, and with those numbers set to increase, it’s imperative that improvements and modernizations are carried out to deliver more frequent, reliable, and safe services, while causing minimal disruption to passengers. 

For Network Rail, a publicly owned infrastructure manager which maintains large swathes of Britain’s train tracks, this means track renewal programs must be carefully planned and designed to avoid major service disruption, and The THINKLab’s new simulation tool can evaluate rail works in a virtual simulation environment.

With this innovative software, Network Rail can dramatically improve the efficiency, cost, and the time it takes to deliver a project. “In the past it would take a full week to plan a weekend’s work,” says Steve Naybour, Head of Transformation at the Network Rail South Alliance. “This effort can now be reduced to a few hours using the new tool.” 

The THINKLab’s simulation tool enables Network Rail to build a 3D model of any site from a range of data sources. Virtual tracks are positioned onto 3D digital terrain from CAD or laser-scanned track data. Building Information Modelling (BIM) models of overhead line equipment, ballast, sleepers, rails, and signalling apparatus can be imported for a more accurate representation of the physical site. And a library of plant equipment assets provides excavators and diggers to include in the simulation. 

Users can define the resources needed to complete the project and build a timeline of activities, with task interdependencies mapped. Costing functionality in the software provides an accurate view of the financial impact of choices. As planning decisions are made and data is input, the software automatically simulates the work, offering views from a number of camera angles, at different levels of magnification, and at different speeds. 

Any changes in the planning inputs are immediately represented in the simulation. This results in much shorter feedback loops compared to the conventional approach to computer modeling, because engineers, designers and planners don’t have to rely on computer-modeling specialists to see the implications of changes to their plans. 

The tool could prove invaluable for assigning the right amount of resources to Network Rail’s track renewal programs. “Whereas we might have used five pieces of equipment for a job, we can often use two or three,” says Stephen Kearney, Head of Development at S&C Alliance South East. “With this package, we can see and prove what we will need in advance.”

Leveraging Blueprints to improve workflow efficiency

Unreal Engine is the go-to solution for nearly all of THINKlab’s visualization work. “We started migrating most of our projects to UE4 shortly after it became public, as it provided vastly superior image quality out-of-the-box and allowed much easier and faster iteration of our scenes,” says Michal Cieciura, Lead Developer at THINKlab. “The licensing model was fantastic, and we were getting a top-tier engine for next to nothing.”

With access to the engine’s source code, the team’s developers could familiarize themselves with the framework much faster, which allowed them to optimize the mechanics early on and to a much greater degree.

They also made good use of the Blueprint visual scripting system, the scripting language that puts tools that are ordinarily reserved for programmers into the hands of designers and other non-programmers. “The Blueprint system not only made prototyping and experimental designs a breeze for our programmers, but it also allowed the non-programming members to become more self-sufficient, as they were able to build parts of the needed functionality themselves,” says Cieciura. “This, in turn, made our workflow more efficient overall.”

Having worked with node-based interfaces in their respective modeling packages, team members on the project found the engine’s Material Editor easy to get to grips with. “What’s more, the PBR materials—in combination with Unreal Engine’s lighting solutions—have not only improved visual realism in real time, but also removed the requirement for offline rendering,” says Cieciura.

For Network Rail, the innovation has already proved worth its weight in gold. “This tool reduces the risk of incurring additional cost and time in the delivery of the work,” says Ameet Masania, Programme Manager at Network Rail. “It’s becoming an integral tool in the way we deliver railway jobs.” 

For more information please visit THINKdigital or email: thinklab@salford.ac.uk

Thank you to Unreal Engine and their continued support, read more.

Point Clouds used for demonstration courtesy of Transport for London

Michal Cieciura, a Principal Software Engineer at THINKlab, has recently won a funding application from this year’s 2018 Unreal Development Grants.

The award is part of the larger $5m development grant by Epic Games which was founded in 2015 to help programmers and studios that are developing the Unreal Engine 4.

Michal is one of 37 winners from a variety of teams or individual creators, who received between $5,000 and $50,000 to support the development of their games, tools, broadcast and more.

His winning entry is a Point Cloud Plugin, a free plugin for Unreal Engine 4, which he has created to help with importing, processing and rendering point clouds. Currently, the software is in beta and supports desktop and VR platforms. It is already being used for a number of individuals, commercial and academic projects in architectural visualisation, construction & engineering, games & entertainment and landscape visualisation.

Michal said: “The plugin originated as a simple tool to aid in one of our in-house projects. I decided to make it a little bit more consumer-ready and release it for free on the Unreal Engine Forums. After it received surprisingly positive feedback, I continued improving it and started recording users’ ideas and suggestions for new features. This eventually led to the creation of a streamlined, standalone plugin which it currently is.

There have been many challenges to overcome throughout the work including performance and general handling of the huge data sets the point clouds often come in. It allowed me to acquire a more in-depth understanding of the different parts of the engine, which coincidently benefited other ongoing projects, both personally and in the THINKlab.”

THINKlab Director, Prof Terrence Fernando added: “We are so happy that Michal won this prestigious award from EPIC in recognition of his contribution to the gaming community. This is an indication of the quality of the VR team within the THINKlab.”

Michal was recently invited to an exclusive event in London which was part of Unreal Engine BuildLondon’18 for Architecture. The event showcased how real-time visualisation technology is being used across the architecture and construction industries, enabling architects and their clients to experience projects in full photographic quality and, if required, in mixed reality. The event took place at the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) in London and included a number of high profile speakers from leading agencies including Zaha Hadid, NVIDIA, Soluis Group, Garou VR and Heatherwick Studio.

Michal is the Principal Software Engineer at THINKlab working in the Enterprise Team. An experienced developer of interactive 3D environments, he has been instrumental in delivering a number of commercial projects for clients including Siemens, Network Rail and the BBC.  Outside of work, his personal interest include virtual reality, computer graphics, game engines and weightlifting!

Point Clouds used for demonstration courtesy of Dr Neil Entwistle, UoS