I am interested in finding a unreal engine 4 compatible program to create photo realistic 3d objects mesh, actors, pawns for unreal content. From photos,
I am an artist, wanting to create, not necessarily generate games. love photo realism in games want to help create placeable content, help game generators with scene objects trash, lamps, interior and exterior house designs, fences, stone and rubble brushes. and such.
the process is a complex one. Unreal is a PBR engine (Physically Based Rendering) which is photo-realism. The difficulty is knowing how lights acts in the real world and then duplicate that in a game engine. To achieve this you need a 3d modeling software, Maya, 3dsmax, blender. and then learn about uv mapping for the models. Next a texturing process. As PBR is becoming the mainstream many applications such as quixel and substance are designed to create PBR textures to simulate a materials light reflectance to give the appearance of real world materials. I know that isnt the exact answer you are looking for but as far as I know there isnt a program that takes a photograph and instantly makes it as a textured model. If there was everyone would buy it because it would be worth GOLD. The entire process we game devs go through is time consuming and sometimes tedious but required to get good results.
Hello Late-Roller, unlike EyeDee’s comment (sorta), there is actually software that can do just that.
Though, you’d need to make many, many… MANY photos of said real life object to convert them into a 3d model, and even after that, you need to manually optimize both the textures and meshes to be production ready.
Its called photogrammetry, there are some free versions of the software out there, and also really expensive ones (up to a few 10’s of thousands of dollars) and all have their pro’s and con’s.
Epic recently put some information about it on their blog:
https://www.unrealengine./blog/imperfection-for-perfection
https://www.unrealengine./blog/imperfection-for-perfection-part-2
Its probably best to start there, and google more information yourself 