Balinese Cave | Realtime Environment

Another update to my real-time thesis project! My goal is to create photo-realism using a real-time engine. On this update, I've added multiple cinecam in Unreal along with additional FX animation. The sequence was rendered out from sequencer, while using Nuke to add a realistic depth-of-field and lens flare.

A little breakdown on my photogrammetry pipeline used to generate the Balinese assets for my thesis real-time environment art.

Before we start we doing aligning images, it's best to start the work in creating a Color Profile. X-rite provides a free color checker software that allows us to extract the profile data using DNG images. One of the biggest practice is to always bring a color checker with you when working on a photogrammetry project.

Now that we have the color profile data, we can batch apply them using Adobe Bridge. Just open one image through the Camera RAW plugin and copy the attributes to the rest of the shot. This will allow us to generate a same color correction without the need to do it manually one by one.

Finally, we can start working on making it into 3D. I choose Reality Capture as it provides a faster iteration along with less noise mesh compared to Agisoft Photoscan. And working on a laptop gives Reality Capture more advantage and flexibility over Agisoft.

Another benefit in using Reality Capture over Agisoft is the fact that the UI is so much easier to navigate. A nice dark themed UI, along with in program tutorials made me love Reality Capture right away. It took me around 1 hour from aligning the images to exporting the highpoly mesh from the software.

Here's a screenshot in how I work with layering the materials. I have also created a Metallic mask in Photoshop to make sure I get more control in shading the mesh later. Once satisfied, I just exported them using the Packed UE4 Preset from Painter. This is one of my main reason to go straight to Substance for texturing, as we know, Substance Painter supports Unreal Engine 4 even though it uses a different shading model than what we used in offline render engines.

This is an ongoing real-time thesis project based on my hometown's, Bali, culture. The major Balinese assets were scanned by me during my last trip back home. The environment assets were from Quixel and Epic's free asset packs. Textured using Quixel and Substance, shaded and lit in Unreal Engine 4. Depth of field and lens flare was added in Nuke.

An early concept art I made for the environment

A real-time test to make sure the photogrammetry pipeline works. The Balinese scanned assets were processed using Reality Capture, cleaned up in Zbrush and baked in Substance. Details was shown using only normal maps, without displacement or parallax occlusion.