Epic Games has announced the acquisition of Capturing Reality, the creators of the popular photogrammetry tool Reality Capture that amongst many other things was used to create the Megascans library. According to Epic, the plan is to integrate Reality Capture into the Unreal Engine ecosystem, but they are stressing that new and existing customers will continue to be supported whatever their industry.
Thanks to the acquisition, from immediate effect Reality Capture is now a lot cheaper. A perpetual license that used to cost and eye-watering 15,000 EUROs (equivalent to roughly 17,849 USD) has been reduced to 3,750 USD. If this is still too much, Reality Capture has a Pay-Per-Input licensing system for pay-on-demand scan reconstruction which is now approximately 5 times less expensive.
Specifics for longer-term plans are short on details at this point, the announcement merely explains that “Epic plans to integrate Capturing Reality’s powerful photogrammetry software into the Unreal Engine ecosystem. Capturing Reality will continue support and development for partners across industries like gaming, visual effects, film, surveying, architecture, engineering, construction and cultural heritage. This also includes companies that do not use Unreal Engine.”
Read the announcement in full on the Epic Games blog.
The Big Feast.
We have finally arrived in the Digital Mesozoic Era! Large animals forage unopposed through rich prairies, pick and devour everything they like.
But no, these are not majestic-looking reptiles. They have now the appearance of creatures in Gargantua and Pantagruel – grotesque big, gluttonous, carnivalesque.
I’m not sure this is good. Plenty of markets outside of games/archviz have a need for specialized software with a focus on reliability and accuracy. Yes, it’s cheaper now… but those in need of advanced scan/photogrammetry postprocessing will have it a bit harder now with a new owner who likely has a focus on the entertainment industry more than any other area.
What makes you think that the entertainment industry does not need reliability and accuracy?
If you ever see a scanning system used in construction/engineering/manufacturing you’ll know what I mean. When a calibration bar costs 15K EUR you want your software to handle the data correctly.
RC has a lot of features targeted at other audiences than entertainment, photogrammetry just happened to get easy and fast enough for their needs in the last few years.
Entertainment needs results in the ‘good enough’ category – no one’s interested in more than that, it only costs money and bandwidth.
Engineering needs a detail and accuracy high enough to ensure they can plan their 300 million project based on the data acquired, it’ll cost them money if they aren’t accurate and on point.
I’d say that’s something else than your game level / AR environment or whatever shiny thing you need for you app/game.
Epic may look at profits from these markets, but they sure can’t dance at two parties at the same time and be good at it.
Then again, what do I know.
So what are you implying? That they start to limit or remove those features targeted at high accuracy audiences?
Since one of the directions Epic is pushing their products is also engineering visualization, what makes you think that they won’t listen to engineering userbase? Or what makes you think that the userbases other than the engineering crowd would not benefit from and appreciate improvements to the software made in the direction of increased detail and accuracy?
I don’t see any misalignments of targets here. Anyone, regardless of their industry wants their photogrammetry software to be as accurate, detailed and performant as possible.