Realityscan 1.1
PRICE 10 free scans per month / Pro £19/$25 monthly / £145/$180annual COMPANY Epic Games WEBSITE unrealengine.com/realityscan
Epic Games marked a defining year in 2021. Through the introduction of Metahuman alongside the acquisition of Capturing Reality, Epic Games displayed its intention to make it as easy as possible to create assets for Unreal Engine.
Metahuman has gone from strength to strength and now enables artists to deliver not only realistic-looking humans, but ones that are animatable. The acquisition of Capturing Reality and its associated 3D scanning technology has also delivered incredible results. Realityscan is free to use and the resulting models are not limited to use only in Unreal Engine, unlike Metahuman.
The first thing I was impressed by was the visual feedback in the camera view. As I took photos, the 3D location of those photos was being overlaid live onto the camera view. This made it incredibly easy to see where gaps were in the photo coverage, and whether I was maintaining an even gap between my photos.
Alongside this, the AR guidance proved particularly helpful in that it told me exactly where I needed to take extra photos. It highlighted problem images with a red outline, which meant I could address problems in the coverage and a lack of overlap in the photos. This feature is fairly common to scanning apps, but in Realityscan there is the additional feature that it gives you a brief note to explain how you can fix the problem images.
The process of capturing photo scans truly felt like a team effort between me and the app, almost like my hand was being held throughout the process to ensure it was as pain-free as possible.
Inexperienced users will particularly appreciate the support offered by the app.
One of the downsides is that it’s strongly tied into Sketchfab. You not only need an Epic Games account to use Realityscan, but you then need a further Sketchfab account to be able to access and download your models. I would prefer to have stayed within the Realityscan framework to access my models. Users are also limited to just 10 uploads per month before having to pay for a pro or premium account. This takes a bit of a shine off the ‘free’ app.
All in all, this is a brilliant scanning app. It’s easy to use, intuitive and the features that it offers make the overall scanning process feel pretty seamless and simple.
“ITS FEATURES MAKE THE SCANNING PROCESS FEEL PRETTY SEAMLESS”