Interactive Real-Time Workspace Experience

Turning a static architectural render into a walkable, real-time product experience — with interactive lighting and contextual hotspots.

This is a browser port for viewing, not the deliverable. The real build runs in Unreal Engine 5 with Lumen global illumination, Blueprint interaction and UMG info cards — none of which survive an FBX round trip, and all of which are in the recording further down. What the port does carry faithfully is the fixture bundle: the mesh, its emissive and its light are driven by a single toggle, exactly as `BP_LightFixture` does it. The shipped build groups those fixtures into zones; here they are one switch.

A static render shows what a space looks like, but not how it feels to move through or how its features work. This project rebuilt the workspace concept as a real-time environment you can walk through, with lights that respond to clicks and product specs that surface in place — one interactive artifact instead of scattered renders and spec sheets.

1. 01

   Modeling — Blender

   Full interior modeled to real-world scale, at 1 unit = 1 cm. Standardized bottom-center pivots and applied transforms so everything snapped cleanly in Unreal. Lighting positions were blocked out early to guide fixture placement.

2. 02

   Scene & materials — Unreal Engine 5

   FBX import as static meshes with box and convex collision for navigation and raycasting. PBR master materials with exposed parameters — roughness, normal, tint. Lit dynamically with Lumen: a directional sun plus interior point and spot lights.

• Lighting system

  One reusable actor, so a fixture is never half-on.

  • A reusable BP_LightFixture bundles mesh, light and material so they toggle together.
  • Intensity and emissive glow ramp up or drop to zero in sync.
  • Triggered by click (line trace) or by a proximity volume.

• Hotspots

  Specs surface in place, instead of in a separate sheet.

  • Widget markers at key features — specs, cable management, ergonomics.
  • Hover highlights the marker; click opens a UMG info card.
  • Optional camera blend to frame the feature being described.

• The bulb still glowed when off

  Light visibility and material emissive were separate states, so killing the light left a lit-looking bulb. Linking both to the same toggle event made them die together — the reason the fixture became one reusable actor rather than a light placed next to a mesh.

• Light bled through walls

  Walls had been modeled as single-sided planes with no thickness, so point lights spilled straight through them. Giving the walls real thickness in Blender and re-importing fixed it at the source, rather than working around it with light channels.

What it replaced

Scattered static renders and separate spec sheets, collapsed into one artifact.