LIDAR Scans in Unreal Engine 5 with Nanite Mesh Technology

Unreal Engine 5 is a game engine that can be used to create realistic environments and when combined with photogrammetry and lidar scanned models the possibilities are endless.

UE has been around for a while now but, recently, the company released its new engine version 5 with nanite technology. This is a huge breakthrough in computer graphics and how high poly meshes are rendered on screen. Before now a mesh would typically be comprised of as few polygon surfaces as possible to create the 3d effect desired. High levels of detail were baked into images and normal maps to give the illusion of mesh detail without the detail being there. This greatly reduced the strain on the graphics cards and processing power. What nanite allows is to maintain that high res high polygon geometry and it filters out the polygons based on the pixels being displayed on the screen. Basically, if a polygon is not seen it is not rendered. This greatly reduces the intensity of the processing power and allows us to use much more dense geometries.

This breakthrough in tech coincides right as the lidar 3d scanning technology is becoming more mainstream. Iphones now capable of capturing high-resolution textured models of our environment means there are more and more uses for these two technologies to emerge together.

3D scanning is going to make it much easier to create realistic environments and models. UE5 is going to make it that much easier to bring those models into digital worlds.

Nanite mesh technology will allow 3D artists to scan objects and spaces with their preferred device. Edit those models slightly in your modeling program of choice. (Cough..Blender..Cough) and import the high-resolution mesh into Unreal.

It’s never been this easy to bring real-world scaled objects and spaces into a digital world. In the world of Architecture, this allows us to transform existing spaces into new digital copies. It allows us to step beyond simple sketches and transform real spaces into concepts for our clients. Visual spaces our clients can experience.

This feels like the future. What do you think?

#ue4unreal #unrealengine5 #ue4 #ue5 #nanite #lumen