5 ms·

Capturing Reality is now part of Epic Games

126 points by dagmx 6y ago

oliyoung 6y ago
I hope, and can see, Epic just making this free (it's pretty cheap now, but it'd make sense to encourage more model development). Which is hugely exciting because this is phenomenal tech and in the hands of potentially everyone, could produce amazing stuff.
- jnsie 6y ago
  Pretty nice reduction in price to begin with!
  - cheapsteak 6y ago
    To save people a click Perpetual enterprise local license dropped from 15k EUR to 3.5k USD Lowest tier pay-per-input cloud credits dropped from 20 EUR for 8k megapixels to 10 USD for 14k megapixels
jfim 6y ago
The captured models in the videos look really amazing. Wow!
kbenson 6y ago
I seem to recall a prior Epic technology had something to do with dynamically scaling models to fewer polygons automatically. I'm not sure if that is completely automatic, or works as I'm assuming, but I imagine there's probably some amazing synergy with this technology.
- pestaa 6y ago
  It's generally called "LOD", dynamically changing the level of detail of an object based on the distance from the camera. It has been a pretty widely used optimization technique for a long time, and not specific to Unreal Engine (though I can't find which 3D renderer introduced it first).
  - kbenson 6y ago
    The impression I got was that instead of dynamically changing between a few different pre-made models for an asset at a specific point, it could automatically scale a very high quality and poly count model down to less quality (that is, generate the lower quality model automatically from the high quality one), and on the fly or maybe JIT, but I'm not sure if that's accurate or if that's also old tech. Edit: See your sibling comment, which came in just after I originally replied here.
  - jimbob45 6y ago
    You can see that on Mario himself in Super Mario 64 if you have him run far away from the camera (or fall off an edge).
  - phy6 6y ago
    I was in the back room of Epic Megagames in 97 when Tim Sweeney showed me his automatic LOD on the Skaarj model. It was pretty basic compared to the current tech, but I think remember him saying it didn't require lower poly meshes/maps to be generated by the animators/artists. I don't know if the LOD was pre-baked or not at the time, but given that we were running the first MMX chips it probably was.
- lfowles 6y ago
  Nanite? > Nanite virtualized micropolygon geometry frees artists to create as much geometric detail as the eye can see. Nanite virtualized geometry means that film-quality source art comprising hundreds of millions or billions of polygons can be imported directly into Unreal Engine—anything from ZBrush sculpts to photogrammetry scans to CAD data—and it just works. Nanite geometry is streamed and scaled in real time so there are no more polygon count budgets, polygon memory budgets, or draw count budgets; there is no need to bake details to normal maps or manually author LODs; and there is no loss in quality. https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/a-first-look-at-unreal-engine-5 https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/a-first-look-at-unre...
  - kbenson 6y ago
    Yes, I believe that's what I'm recalling, I remember there was a cave walk through demonstrated along with it. I would think a technology that claims the more detail the better and that it will deal with worrying about optimizing what can be handled would work very well with a high quality scanning technology to make very detailed real-world based models.
    - hug 6y ago
      The cave walk-through in question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qC5KtatMcUw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qC5KtatMcUw
rsp1984 6y ago
Very well deserved. Having worked on 3D capture and reconstruction for the last 10 years I can say that CR is really way ahead of everyone else technologically and it was only a matter of time before someone would buy them out. I'm glad it was Epic.
- fearface 6y ago
  Why are you glad it’s Epic?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - dave_sullivan 6y ago
    Not OP, but possibly because they are working to upend steams monopoly on game distribution and offer an arguably better engine than the venture backed/pressured unity.
    - Jcowell 6y ago
      Is steam really a monopoly ? There are other stores and launchers no?
      - dave_sullivan 6y ago
        They're a monopoly the way apple is a monopoly. Maybe "anti-competitive" is a better word. There are other choices, but they have such a large share of the market "locked in" to their specific platforms that developers are forced to work with them or get out of the business. Good luck not having an iOS version of your app or not launching your game on steam, etc. With proper competitive pressure, the price of distributing a game or app should go down over time, not stay pegged at an arbitrary 30%. > What makes you think that the Epic Store won't be exactly the same given half the chance? The laws of competitive pressure.
        6y ago
pengstrom 6y ago
Is this clever use of SLAM or something even more interesting?
- tootie 6y ago
  Photogrammetry is what they say. It's a technique that involves stitching together loads of still photos to reconstruct a 3d surface. It's not real-time capture, it's for creating 3d models.
mdorazio 6y ago
Can someone familiar with actual game development comment on how this works in conjunction with typical polycount concerns for games? My experience with environment scanning (notably limited to Matterport) has been that the models it spits out are... really bad in many ways, most notably the mesh geometry is an absolute mess as you would expect from estimating things based on scans. It seems like if you wanted to use scanned or photogrammetric-based models in a real game where performance matters, you'd end up having to basically recreate them. Hoping I'm wrong and someone can explain how this fits into a real-world asset pipeline.
- unphased 6y ago
  The key is to have sophisticated software to "filter" down the content into reasonable geometry (rather than the grossly inefficient geometry you'd get out of typical photogrammetry) and then into LOD levels and very optimized streaming representations for that geometry. Anyway this is why unreal engine 5 comes together with current-generation console runtime SSD streaming, it's to facilitate this sort of streaming large quantities of geometry for virtual environments. Obviously your result is only gonna be as good as your source imagery, but a large part of the magic is in how precisely the photogrammetry is able to solve and compute correct camera poses so as not to inject artifacts, combined with the automated generation of efficient meshes. It seems like traditional asset pipelines never really had a need for crazy optimized LOD generation. There have been sophisticated mesh optimization tools, but usually it's only a small fraction of the manual effort to make some LODs compared to modeling the actual full detail model. It's usually done manually, but I don't know for sure, never worked in the industry. But you can imagine how this is a non-starter for when your full detail model came out of photogrammetry. I haven't been following it that closely but my take on it is that Unreal Engine 5 is a paradigm shift in that it will liberate you from even needing to consider levels of detail, much the same as you don't consider releasing memory in a garbage collected programming language. This is clearly possible once those concerns you state, "input is an absolute mess", "having to recreate models", become automated and reaches a level of quality that equals what a human can do. I would expect in unreal engine 5 you will be able to import assets in traditional 3D formats (in addition, of course, to a bundle of photos) and it will recommend you provide it with the highest possible quality input. And you'll just be able to straight away instantiate hundreds of thousands of copies of it into your scene stretching into infinity and your framerate will be fine.
nelsonmandela 6y ago
I think the first game engine to include NFTs by default is going to blow up big time
canada_dry 6y ago
This could open up customizing games by adding your own scanned models of things (and head/body) in game. Really hoping to also see some leaps/breakthroughs in photogrammetry tech i.e. significantly less pics with sharper results and faster rendering (not asking for much, eh).
lostgame 6y ago
Wow. This is the first moment that has made me pull my head out from under the many deep layers of Unity sand/code I’m in - if this is seriously a thing I will at the very least use this tool for this and then low-poly it and import into Unity. Wow, y’all. The future is here.

126 points by dagmx 6y ago

I hope, and can see, Epic just making this free (it's pretty cheap now, but it'd make sense to encourage more model development). Which is hugely exciting because this is phenomenal tech and in the hands of potentially everyone, could produce amazing stuff.

jnsie 6y ago
Pretty nice reduction in price to begin with!
- cheapsteak 6y ago
  To save people a click Perpetual enterprise local license dropped from 15k EUR to 3.5k USD Lowest tier pay-per-input cloud credits dropped from 20 EUR for 8k megapixels to 10 USD for 14k megapixels

jfim 6y ago

The captured models in the videos look really amazing. Wow!

kbenson 6y ago

I seem to recall a prior Epic technology had something to do with dynamically scaling models to fewer polygons automatically. I'm not sure if that is completely automatic, or works as I'm assuming, but I imagine there's probably some amazing synergy with this technology.

pestaa 6y ago
It's generally called "LOD", dynamically changing the level of detail of an object based on the distance from the camera. It has been a pretty widely used optimization technique for a long time, and not specific to Unreal Engine (though I can't find which 3D renderer introduced it first).
- kbenson 6y ago
  The impression I got was that instead of dynamically changing between a few different pre-made models for an asset at a specific point, it could automatically scale a very high quality and poly count model down to less quality (that is, generate the lower quality model automatically from the high quality one), and on the fly or maybe JIT, but I'm not sure if that's accurate or if that's also old tech. Edit: See your sibling comment, which came in just after I originally replied here.
- jimbob45 6y ago
  You can see that on Mario himself in Super Mario 64 if you have him run far away from the camera (or fall off an edge).
- phy6 6y ago
  I was in the back room of Epic Megagames in 97 when Tim Sweeney showed me his automatic LOD on the Skaarj model. It was pretty basic compared to the current tech, but I think remember him saying it didn't require lower poly meshes/maps to be generated by the animators/artists. I don't know if the LOD was pre-baked or not at the time, but given that we were running the first MMX chips it probably was.
lfowles 6y ago
Nanite? > Nanite virtualized micropolygon geometry frees artists to create as much geometric detail as the eye can see. Nanite virtualized geometry means that film-quality source art comprising hundreds of millions or billions of polygons can be imported directly into Unreal Engine—anything from ZBrush sculpts to photogrammetry scans to CAD data—and it just works. Nanite geometry is streamed and scaled in real time so there are no more polygon count budgets, polygon memory budgets, or draw count budgets; there is no need to bake details to normal maps or manually author LODs; and there is no loss in quality. https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/a-first-look-at-unreal-engine-5 https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/a-first-look-at-unre...
- kbenson 6y ago
  Yes, I believe that's what I'm recalling, I remember there was a cave walk through demonstrated along with it. I would think a technology that claims the more detail the better and that it will deal with worrying about optimizing what can be handled would work very well with a high quality scanning technology to make very detailed real-world based models.
  - hug 6y ago
    The cave walk-through in question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qC5KtatMcUw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qC5KtatMcUw

rsp1984 6y ago

Very well deserved. Having worked on 3D capture and reconstruction for the last 10 years I can say that CR is really way ahead of everyone else technologically and it was only a matter of time before someone would buy them out. I'm glad it was Epic.

fearface 6y ago
Why are you glad it’s Epic?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- dave_sullivan 6y ago
  Not OP, but possibly because they are working to upend steams monopoly on game distribution and offer an arguably better engine than the venture backed/pressured unity.
  - Jcowell 6y ago
    Is steam really a monopoly ? There are other stores and launchers no?
    - dave_sullivan 6y ago
      They're a monopoly the way apple is a monopoly. Maybe "anti-competitive" is a better word. There are other choices, but they have such a large share of the market "locked in" to their specific platforms that developers are forced to work with them or get out of the business. Good luck not having an iOS version of your app or not launching your game on steam, etc. With proper competitive pressure, the price of distributing a game or app should go down over time, not stay pegged at an arbitrary 30%. > What makes you think that the Epic Store won't be exactly the same given half the chance? The laws of competitive pressure.
      - 6y ago

pengstrom 6y ago

Is this clever use of SLAM or something even more interesting?

tootie 6y ago
Photogrammetry is what they say. It's a technique that involves stitching together loads of still photos to reconstruct a 3d surface. It's not real-time capture, it's for creating 3d models.

mdorazio 6y ago

Can someone familiar with actual game development comment on how this works in conjunction with typical polycount concerns for games? My experience with environment scanning (notably limited to Matterport) has been that the models it spits out are... really bad in many ways, most notably the mesh geometry is an absolute mess as you would expect from estimating things based on scans. It seems like if you wanted to use scanned or photogrammetric-based models in a real game where performance matters, you'd end up having to basically recreate them. Hoping I'm wrong and someone can explain how this fits into a real-world asset pipeline.

unphased 6y ago
The key is to have sophisticated software to "filter" down the content into reasonable geometry (rather than the grossly inefficient geometry you'd get out of typical photogrammetry) and then into LOD levels and very optimized streaming representations for that geometry. Anyway this is why unreal engine 5 comes together with current-generation console runtime SSD streaming, it's to facilitate this sort of streaming large quantities of geometry for virtual environments. Obviously your result is only gonna be as good as your source imagery, but a large part of the magic is in how precisely the photogrammetry is able to solve and compute correct camera poses so as not to inject artifacts, combined with the automated generation of efficient meshes. It seems like traditional asset pipelines never really had a need for crazy optimized LOD generation. There have been sophisticated mesh optimization tools, but usually it's only a small fraction of the manual effort to make some LODs compared to modeling the actual full detail model. It's usually done manually, but I don't know for sure, never worked in the industry. But you can imagine how this is a non-starter for when your full detail model came out of photogrammetry. I haven't been following it that closely but my take on it is that Unreal Engine 5 is a paradigm shift in that it will liberate you from even needing to consider levels of detail, much the same as you don't consider releasing memory in a garbage collected programming language. This is clearly possible once those concerns you state, "input is an absolute mess", "having to recreate models", become automated and reaches a level of quality that equals what a human can do. I would expect in unreal engine 5 you will be able to import assets in traditional 3D formats (in addition, of course, to a bundle of photos) and it will recommend you provide it with the highest possible quality input. And you'll just be able to straight away instantiate hundreds of thousands of copies of it into your scene stretching into infinity and your framerate will be fine.

nelsonmandela 6y ago

I think the first game engine to include NFTs by default is going to blow up big time

canada_dry 6y ago

This could open up customizing games by adding your own scanned models of things (and head/body) in game. Really hoping to also see some leaps/breakthroughs in photogrammetry tech i.e. significantly less pics with sharper results and faster rendering (not asking for much, eh).

lostgame 6y ago

Wow. This is the first moment that has made me pull my head out from under the many deep layers of Unity sand/code I’m in - if this is seriously a thing I will at the very least use this tool for this and then low-poly it and import into Unity. Wow, y’all. The future is here.