David Perkins, founder of Imaginary Labs, tells us what's new with Carbon For Unreal, a pre-visualization tool using the Unreal game engine.This cutting-edge software will be at LDI 2023, where Perkins will be teaching a hands-on class in the LDInstitute on Friday, December 1, starting with 101: The Basics in the morning, an advanced session in the afternoon, or a full-day Combo Class. Imaginary Labs will also have a demo room (W110 LVCC) where Perkins will share the latest features of Carbon For Unreal. In the meantime, Live Design checks in with Perkins to get the scoop.
Live Design: How did Carbon for Unreal come about?
David Perkins: Carbon was born out of dis-satisfaction with current toolsets and workflows. One of the early mandates of my first “real” jobs in the industry was to create a way to do renders in real-time. The design process was always being held up by processing time. I later discovered various previz applications, but the quality was always sacrificed for speed. When we created our first previz service company, Imaginary Lights, we started exploring the viability of using Unreal to close the gap and offer both quality and speed. It quickly became apparent to us that Unreal is a stable foundation, and our dream could be realized. We then formed a new sister company, Imaginary Labs, to focus wholly on building tools for the entertainment industry using this powerful ecosystem.
LD: Unreal Engine is a big player in gaming —what is the relationship between that and Carbon for Unreal?
DP: Our industry has been no stranger to 3D gaming technology for quite some time. Pretty much all pre-visualization software companies have spun up their own “game engine” to specialize in rendering lights, beams, etc. As users of a number of these tools, we saw a pretty wide gap in quality between those engines and Unreal. This led us to explore the viability of using Unreal in 2018, rather than re-invent the wheel. What I love about this approach, is we benefit from the work of hundreds of scientists who push the tech to it’s limits. We are then able to focus on our subject matter and build a great user experience that leverages that core technology.
LD: What's new this year?
DP: This is an exciting year for us. We’ve shipped two major releases, which have added scores of new features such as MVR geometry importing, Unreal 5 support, along with performance and quality of life improvements. We’re also working on a way to ship Carbon as a standalone product. This will allow users to have a more streamlined experience, while using the same powerful core as our Carbon for Unreal Plugin. You can keep an eye on our Facebook or Discord group to be the among the first to get news on that.
LD: Can you explain the course you will be teaching at LDI?
DP: I love teaching this class. It’s great to catchup with some existing users, and get to know new ones. We also learn a lot while teaching the class, because we are always hearing how folks want to use the tool in ways we could never have imagined. For new folks, we try to take the “scary” out of Unreal because there’s so much you can do with it. By narrowing focus on how you can use Unreal for Entertainment visualization, we can build confidence quickly so we can get to the fun part! We start in the morning learning the essentials of Unreal engine. After lunch we dig into the workflows and features that transform Unreal into the ultimate show design solution.
LD: What are your technological dreams for the future?
DP: Not meaning to be crass, but I want the design experience to suck less. I think we gained a whole lot of precision with tools like Autocad, Vectorworks, Cinema4D, etc…. but we lost that collaborative spirit that I loved growing up in community theatre. I think there’s a way to bring that back by leveraging modern software. We’re doing our part in making that a reality.