Reality Capture

During my first two weeks I have been introduced to a lot of new and exciting things like how to work in Unreal Engine 5 and Reality Capture. I have tried to follow the tutorial for scanning an object in real life and recreate its 3D version (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6TTaSisCt8 ) and although I failed to get a good mesh after my first two attempts, I succeeded when I took pictures of my object outside. So, my main advice for using RC would be:

• Make sure you have a good, stable lightning (the best option is to go outside, but not under direct sunlight)
• Do not hesitate to take more pictures, it will improve the quality of your mesh

My last mesh turned out very well and could be imported directly into UE5 with no complications, however, it still needs to be cleaned up in Blender or another editing program. Later on, I also recreated Tyson's upper body part, so he could take that model and use only clothing on it for rendering it in Blender.

At the beginning of the second week I got to work on a different part of Reality Capture: how to scan a person and create a mesh for MetaHuman out of these scans. Using spiral motions, I took a video of a person's face, recreated and exported the mesh through RC and put it into UE5 (video tutorial: https://dev.epicgames.com/community/learning/tutorials/y799/capturing-reality-scan-yourself-for-mesh-to-metahuman ). Then, I was able to create a MetaHuman identity from the mesh and edit its features on the MetaHumanCreator website. After doing all of that it's easy to import it into the scene as you would usually do with sample Metahumans using the Quixel library (just remember to log into the same account you have been logged on the MetaHumanCreator website).

In order to get more practice I recreated another person as a MetaHuman and it came out better than the first one (as I moved the camera slower and tried to keep my hands as steady as possible while taking a video), however it could be better. Both videos were taken inside of our lab without special lightning, so it was not as exact as the one in the tutorial. The resemblance could be significantly improved by editing parts like hair, eyebrows, clothing etc. in programs such as Maya or Blender. Since, it was not the main goal, I have not spent my time doing that, but I will probably learn how to do it in the future!    - Sofiia