Maps, and by extension the spatial aspect of them, are a core component of virtual worlds used in video games. These game-engines give a broad set of powerful tools to allow developers to focus on the creative process. The two major players include Epic Games’ Unreal Engine and Unit圓D. The film and entertainment, training and simulation, architecture, and design sectors are all starting to integrate assets generated in game-engines. Game-engines are rapidly evolving to provide 3D creation environments to deliver immersive and interactive content across many industries. Large 3D city models generated using photogrammetry techniques are also being directly integrated into Unreal Engine and Twinmotion to create realistic digital representations of the real-world environment. A great example of increased cooperation between the geospatial and gaming industry is the announcement that Cesium will be making geospatial data available through Unreal Engine. Many of these distinct fields are now merging and interacting more widely with easier access to processing power, photogrammetry tools, advanced computer graphics and image processing capabilities. More recently it has been used in the film and gaming industry. Photogrammetry has now been used for more than 150 years by the mapping and surveying industry and is now used in architecture and cultural heritage, geology and archaeology, and engineering. Photogrammetry was first used to produce topographic maps in the middle of the 19th century.
We use a range of capture methods from the ground with a hand-held camera, through a rig or mounted on aerial platforms.
Photogrammetry can scale to object size so you can digitally recreate anything from a small rock to an entire city.
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The photos are then stitched together using the principle of triangulation through specialized photogrammetry software such as Bentley’s ContextCapture, Capturing Reality’s Realit圜apture, Agisoft’s Metashape, Skyline’s Photomesh, nFrames’ Sure to produce a detailed, geometrically accurate and textured 3D mesh of this asset. Photogrammetry is the process of generating a three-dimensional representation of an asset using overlapping high-resolution photographs taken from multiple angles. We also did an interview with Epic Games about using Virtual clones for digital twin and smart city applications if you’d like to learn more about recreating cities in game engines. This article gives an overview of where the photogrammetry, game-engines and geospatial visualization technology stands today and where that technology is heading. Before being game-ready, 3D assets generated by photogrammetry need to be optimized to reduce rendering cost and hardware/software limitations. While computing power and GPU is increasing, there is still a limit to the amount of 3D data that can be displayed in real-time. Photogrammetry is being used more and more in the gaming industry to create ultra-realistic 3D assets and produce immersive and interactive real-time 3D environments.