Epic Games is Building Something Special
And I’m not talking about Fortnite.
Epic Games has been working on an empire! From groundbreaking updates to their game engine to several strategic acquisitions, they’ve built a software suite that can change the way we work.
To demonstrate what I’m talking about, I’ve gone ahead and put together a quick example. Take the inflatable dinosaur below. What would it take to completely digitize this little buddy and drop it into a virtual world? It’s surprisingly simple to do, thanks to our good friend Epic Games.
Photogrammetry 101
Photogrammetry is simply the act of taking photos of an object from all different angles. Then those photos are stitched together to create a 3d model. Sounds complicated, but new tools have made it incredibly easy. And to answer your next question: yes, Epic Games already has this tool in their arsenal. In fact, just this year they acquired Reality Capture, one of the best photogrammetry solutions on the market.
How does Epic’s photogrammetry tool work? Below I present the result! In all honesty, my expectations were low but it only took a few clicks and the quality of the final product blew me away.
There are a couple of inherent limitations to photogrammetry, the primary one being that the model mesh is extremely dense. Aka, it’s really high quality, which equals a large file size that most computers struggle to manage. Traditionally the next step would be to bring this into another piece of 3d software and clean it up, but for the sake of our demo, I’m going to skip this step. Instead, we’re going to use it straight away in Unreal Engine, Epic Game’s game engine.
Nanite is King
Yes, Unreal Engine is called a game engine, but that’s a vast understatement. It’s become a real-time visualization tool that can build entire worlds.
Unreal Engine 5 early access was released about a month ago and it came with a couple of groundbreaking new features. The one we’ll use with our little dinosaur friend is called Nanite.
Nanite is Unreal’s new geometry system that renders high poly meshes within a scene. With the proper computer, it basically removes any of the limitations you’d traditionally have with high-density meshes. I’m not kidding when I say that this is some of the most groundbreaking tech I’ve ever seen.
In roughly ten minutes I turned this inflatable dinosaur toy into a 3D model and used Unreal Engine to place it in a photo-real scene. In my opinion, the result is pretty incredible.
The technology Epic Games offers has the potential to change the entire field of 3D virtualization. If you have the means (and the GPU), I highly recommend giving this workflow a try. I’m a firm believer in the metaverse promised by Epic Games and am convinced Unreal Engine 5 is a crucial step in that direction.
