Hi, I work in a Cultural-Heritage company specialized in 3D scanning of large environment, we started to use Unreal Engine for visualization of large dataset since the release of Unreal Engine 5 thanks to its processing of large mesh/textures.
Our usage is to make offline renders using movie-render-queue.
It worked well on exterior environments with little vegetation/buildings (like deset/organic-rocky environment) using the default tiles from reality capture and a low r.Nanite.MaxPixelsPerEdge 0.06 to avoid seeing the edges. (sometimes a cache to hide the skylight from underneath was needed).
When this article was released, most of the tools/workflow used looked like what we did internally, and it works really fine for a large-scale exterior environment :
When it comes to interior environment (like church) this the part that gets me often frustrated, as the reality-capture mesh is thin (no thickness) light can gap through the tiles if not-exported as single mesh or tiled externally in another software (only python, as it’s billions of triangles) to add overlap between each tile.
Even then, the light usually doesn’t interact the same way a full-path-tracer would, lot of flickering, some dark places, and some triangles that are perpendicular to light-rays just lit themselves (even If I add shadeless two-sided plane behind to try to stop light from speading).
What would be the ideal way of cutting the mesh ? (tiny tiles, large ones, separate walls from ground? with overlap?)
Also do you have ways to get smoother triangles, sometime the noise from the photogrammetry is really visible when not with shadeless material, compared to a full-pathtracer, it’s like each triangle is lit differently based on their normal, witch make the triangles really more visible/present and overall more sharp as it should.
What are your advice/tips, do you have custom shader to smooth the noise look of those flat surface (or do you sculpt-flat all of them in blender)?
Do you have any special tips like idk, scalling the entire scene by 10 to increase light-bouncing ? Or special tiling, or another option that has to do with distance-field in the scene/lights/post-process or the mesh?