Can’t you invite customers to your office and let them virtually visit the building in a powerful hardware? Or you might go to their house with a powerful laptop. Maybe you can capture it as a video so they can show it to friends and family.
In UE4, aspects like all the improved lightning features would play a lot in your favor to make things look more appealing, although if you consider (this has to be analyzed by someone with experience in the field, like you) that is very negative not to be able to play the product in the customer’s computer you might not want to choose UE4.
If you go with UDK it won’t difficult to move to UE4 in the future, if what you do is mainly level editing you will see the mechanics for that haven’t changed that much.
Bear in mind that the system requirements of UE4 packaged products (games, demos or whatever) are below the editor requirements, which are the ones you might have seen, so this lets more computers to use it.
Anyhow, here is the engine EULA, so you also consider the whole thing in business terms: Game-Engine-Technologie von Unreal - Unreal Engine
I’m currently using an ArchiCAD feature that allows customers to view an interactive architecture model as a “game”. I think UE 4 does the same thing a 100 times better but people who order interactive models usually have mid spec laptops since they are not necessarily gamers or in anyway aware of graphic cards and performance. So I’ve considered learning UDK 3 simply because the editor has lower recommended hardware than UE 4 and therefore will produce games that can run on lower end laptops than UE 4 can.
I tried to make models that are optimized for mobile but its a shame that translucent/refractive materials and even simple foilage is so expensive because this is very important to architectural models in my opinion.
I know too little about the rendering being done in UDK 3 vs the rendering in UE 4 so thats why im asking if I somehow could do large translucent/refractive areas and more complex foilage in UDK 3 and still “reach” more mid spec laptops than would be possible with UE 4?
Inviting customers or visiting them is definitely an option! On the other hand I see it as a powerful selling point that they can download a model and view it whenever they want to. The tradeoff is that I would have to scale the quality depending on the customers hardware and probably also have to deal with errors running the model because of poor maintenance.
You are right about the improved features in UE4 and making things more appealing. That is definitely also something to consider. Very helpful reply Albert!
UE4 can scale down to run on midspec hardware. I’d suggest saving yourself any future headaches and just using UE4. If you find you need more performance you can disable all Post Processing, and use low poly models.
I’m guessing it’s likely that UE4 will actually run better than UE3 if you were to tune a UE4 build down to UE3 fidelity. Someone who has worked in UDK and UE4 would be in a better position to answer, but if you’re starting from scratch now save yourself a transition and just start on UE4.