We’re excited to announce that RealityCapture 1.5 is now available for download from the Epic Games launcher. This latest release brings a number of new features and enhancements that accelerate texturing processes, yield better results, and increase the real-time performance of output meshes. There are also new export options and CLI commands, and more.
Disclaimer: This is an Unreal Engine scene that incorporates assets scanned with RealityCapture, as well as Twinmotion, MetaHuman, and Megascan assets.
Key new features in RealityCapture 1.5
Texturing enhancements
• Texturing speed improvements
We’ve refined the texturing algorithm to reduce disk access and better utilize the CPU, resulting in up to 2x speedups over RealityCapture 1.4, depending on the dataset and hardware specifications. These speed increases are incremental to previous optimizations made in the last release. You can see more details of our test results in this article.
• Photoconsistency texturing support for higher bit depths
We’ve added support for using the photoconsistency-based texturing style with 16-bit and 32-bit inputs. This style can yield better blending results than visibility/mosaicing-based texturing in many cases—such as when working with translucent objects, face scanning, full-body scanning, and laser scan data.
• Respect for masked areas during texturing
Masked areas can now be excluded from the texture projection process, ensuring that unwanted elements—such as background hues and occlusions—do not appear in the final textured model. This can also result in increased sharpness for the output texture.
• Texture defragmentation
We’ve added a new option to defragment textures, making them more efficient for real-time engines and also improving their quality. Fragmented UVs are created by the UV Unwrap tool to prioritize texture fidelity—however, they require more GPU memory and more vertex shader call to draw, and are also prone to visual artifacts at the seams. This new feature will address these issues; you can learn more in this article.
Option to disable watertight meshes
In this release, there’s a new option to remove marginal triangles when reconstructing region boundaries, resulting in non-watertight meshes. Non-watertight meshes offer smaller file sizes, freeing up storage space and reducing load times, optimizing them for real-time applications where solid models aren’t always necessary for high-performance visuals. You can find out more in this article.
Support for relative paths
We’ve added support for relative paths in RealityCapture projects, offering a streamlined workflow when copying projects to another disk. You can find out more in this article.
New export formats and options
• USD
You can now export your assets to USD or USDZ format. This popular collaboration format for 3D content creation offers easy interchange between various applications and compatibility with MaterialX, OpenColorIO, Hydra, and audio files in USDZ.
• COLMAP
We’ve added an option to export RealityCapture components to the COLMAP text format. This format can be used for interchange between RealityCapture and other photogrammetry tools, and tools capable of generating radiance fields. There’s also an option to export Radiance Fields Transforms as Transforms.json. You can find out more in this article.
• PNG 16-bit support for ortho DTM
You can now export digital terrain model (DTM) height maps created using orthographic projections as 16-bit PNG files. This is useful for streamlining high-fidelity terrains for Unreal Engine and Unreal Editor for Fortnite (UEFN) use cases. Take a look at this article for more information on creating height maps.
New CLI commands
• Start button
A companion to the Start button in RealityCapture, this command uses the Start button settings from the Application settings to process inputs with a single action.
• Classification commands
Several commands have been added to make classifying more flexible and customizable. It’s now possible to automate tasks related to classes, classification formats, and classifications. You can easily remove classifications, select and update classes, override vertices, set classification formats, and transfer classifications from the labels layer images.
To see all the updates in RealityCapture 1.5, check out the full release notes.
Get RealityCapture 1.5 today!