Photogrammetry @ SIGGRAPH

I attended a great talk by the folks at Unity regarding photogrammetry. Photogrammetry plays an important part in realistic 3D environments. That combined with PBR texture workflow is the next step for the game engines. This is old hat for VFX offline renderers, but new Nvidia GPUs make this level of detail possible in realtime renderers.

Information about the process and even an ebook is available. To summarize their main tool was Reality Capture, but they also used some tools that were new to me. Knald was used for textures, and Artomatix for tiling.

But the technology that really caught my eye was the de-lighting tool created for Unity. This creates a pretty great albedo from texture images that have fairly strong shadows. I’ve been doing this manually in Photoshop, which isn’t ideal. Now I just need a similar method for my toolset, either Unreal Engine direct, or perhaps this is something Quixel could incorporate in their suite.