Take ANYTHING into Unreal Engine 5 | Photogrammetry Tutorial

in this video we're going to scan this totem pole and this house using our drone and bring it into Unreal Engine 5. we're gonna make it big change the time of day put it in the forest and while we're at it why don't we make it a cinematic [Music] all right and the best part is that you can even customize the texture of your scans to make them super realistic [Music] by the end of this video you will learn how to create the highest quality 3D models using polycam we'll show you three different experiments the oldest Crane in Vancouver the wooden structure in the water and the totem poles from these experiments you're going to see all of our mistakes and learn from our best tips we're also going to walk you through how to customize the texture of your scans using substance painter and how we created our cinematic in Unreal Engine 5. so a couple of weeks ago polycam reached out to us and challenged us to create the cleanest scan for an unreal cinematic and guess what bad decisions never says no to a challenge and we wanted to make it big but we had a problem these objects are extremely huge so we couldn't use our phones as per usual and that is why we had to call it a drone because with the drones we can now go to higher altitudes and capture any angle that we want plus it's really fun let's start the most important factor you need to consider for photogrammetry is lighting remember whatever you capture will end up printed on your 3D model so if you have harsh lights or Shadows those also will be printed on your model we don't want that if you're shooting Outdoors you have absolutely no control over the lighting and that means you have to choose your time wisely the best time to go ahead and shoot Outdoors is on overcast and cloudy days and that is because the clouds act as a soft box to the sun causing uniform lighting and Shadows on your models since we're in the middle of a hot summer here in Vancouver the sun is out pretty much all day long and so for our very first scan we have to get up as early as sunrise and that was 5 a.m let's go where we go now we are going to the oldest Crane in Vancouver we are going to scan the whole Crane and we're gonna bring it into Unreal Engine 5. here is how we started taking out photos for our first orbit we always want to keep the entire subject within the frame and so we went all the way up in the air pointed the camera down and started taking photos while the entire crane was visible in the shot if you move too much in between each frame the offers that will do the processing will have a hard time figuring out what your model looks like so very small movements between each frame that's really important after our first orbit we try to go closer to the crane and although we lost visibility a part of the crane it's completely fine because now we're going in for more detail after that orbit we try to go on Lower altitudes to try to cover and we realize this bird clearly doesn't like our drones dude it keeps oh break it down did you see that yeah yeah that wasn't our only problem though nope that was it that's all that happened our skill Union strong pilot flew our drone into the trees it was an accident okay don't die it's here you need to catch it [Applause] safe I think we got it yes we got our drone back but we couldn't capture all of the shots we needed Before Sunrise the only part that we managed to capture quite well was the base of the crane I would have loved to take more photos of the front side and get more detailed shots but we couldn't so we only have one full round at the top when the whole thing is visible but we don't have any close-ups of the main front side of the crane which could be Troublesome we don't know yet but we'll find out we came back home and before uploading 300 photos into polycam we went through all of them and removed any blurry or out of focus photo from them because those will only ruin our final result then we went to poly.com and created a new capture create a 3D model and uploaded all the images the option that you see for object masking is only for small objects that you might rotate by hand so for today's video We're Not Gonna use it for our detail we're going to select full because we want the highest quality and for our sequential option we're gonna turn it on because we took our photos in order poly hands done processing so let's check it out that's not bad but you see the middle part has a lot more detail and that's probably because we took a lot more photos but do you see the top part yeah it's missing some detail there you know why uh someone crashed our drone damn we couldn't take enough photos it's okay though we learned our lesson so why don't we move on to the next subject okay we found this abolished wooden structure in the water it was perfect it was filled with texture and details from the long exposure to the water and plus we could train ourselves with the Drone because it was virtually impossible to go around it with your phone this time around we wanted to use the 48 megapixel mode on the DJI Mini Pro 3 which allows you to take four times the resolution compared to the 12 megapixel sensor that is on the Drone now that might sound great but there are a couple of caveats to it it's using a processing system called the quad Bayer filtering system to allow you to split the pixels from 12 to 48 and that sounds great but imagine those pixels are now receiving less light meaning that if you're shooting in Darker conditions you might end up with a darker photo and a noisier image which is no good not good for me but on top of that every time you take the photos it takes about a second to process them in midair which means that you're taking much less photos in the same amount of time that's also a no good but the time you burn through three full batteries we've only taken about 300 photos now polycam allows you to upload a thousand photos and the more photos you have the more detail you will have on your model so you're telling me sharper images less photos or more photos that are not as shocked considering that we're shooting outdoors and the lighting is going to change if you spend too long taking photos of a single object I'd say we have to take the most amount of photos we can in the shortest amount of time possible and so we're gonna go for a normal mode next time plus we're going to use Adobe Lightroom to actually increase the sharpness in post which is going to help us at least a little bit all right you guys ready let's check it out oh this is good okay yeah that's I mean we got the entire model and I really thought we would fail because there is water moving underneath but that's pretty good yeah but we still need more detail can you zoom in yeah our final and best attempt bro s near the University of British Columbia you drove 20 minutes outside downtown Vancouver to come to UBC Museum of anthropology but it's closed for construction I think it's here or here I don't know where we're looking for totem poles right did we find it I think so yeah if you look at these totem poles dude this is heaven this is the most beautiful place I've ever been in look at that look at that wow wow do you guys see the water Beautiful by now we know that we should take clear images and cover all angles but the question is where should we start how should we end how should we move now planning the trajectory of your shots can be extremely overwhelming so let's give you some tips always maintain a constant orbit as you're going around your subject whether you're using a phone or a drone keep your subject in the middle of the frame and in Focus while gradually switching your distance from the subject and lowering or elevating your altitude let's say for example you've already done a couple of orbits and now you want more detailed close-up shots from the back don't just move directly across keep your orbit and gradually switch your altitude and your distance from the subject while still taking photos let's use another example if you need to tilt the camera up lower your altitude and get closer to the subject do each of those actions separately and take a photo in between don't do them all at once and then take a photo at the end of it if you follow all these rules you're going end up with a great looking model I promise I just want to show you guys a little behind the scenes of how we're doing this I'm using the DJI Mini Pro 3 tracking I'm just dragging and selecting over my object and it tracks that so all I need to do is just press the capture button and then just move to the left and it automatically rotates around my subject it's much simpler than trying to take this with your phone because your phone doesn't know how to track an object when we were scanning the back of of the house we faced a couple of challenges first we only had one battery left that meant 30 minutes of flight time second There Were Trees covering the back of the house preventing a full orbit so what did we do we realized that the best approach was a planner hack we identified our Focus areas prior to shooting which meant we were thinking where we're going to place our cameras in Unreal Engine 5. and we decided to take the most amount of photos from those areas for the house it meant we went high in the air pointed the camera down at the exact angle we needed and started going in half orbit around the house once we were done with an orbit we would come down a lower altitude and then do another half orbit in the opposite direction and then we repeated that a couple of times and then finished up with a couple of close-up shots now I'm going up now I'm changing my level and height and I need to head in there so I'm gonna track a little bit higher this time and it's going to automatically go higher and now I'm just going to do another rotation this time time before uploading the photos into polycam we use the Adobe Lightroom to enhance our photo this was inspired by William voucher shout out to him he does a lot of photogrammetry so if you guys are interested in this topic make sure you check him out in Lightroom we reduce the highlights boosted the shadows and slightly increased sharpness in our image now what's beautiful is that by doing this we just balanced the Overexposed areas of our image and also revealed the darker parts of the image while increasing the quality just a little bit and the beauty of Adobe Lightroom is that we can now copy the settings we applied to this single image and apply it to everything else with a single click of a button once we were done we exported all of these images as full quality jpegs uploaded all the photos into polycam and in less than 30 minutes we got the result do you see the totem pole do you see it do you see how good it is dude this looks so freaking good I honestly we did not expect to get this quality let's talk about the Cinematic now we needed to download our model so we went to polycam and hit export there are more than 15 options to choose from both Point cloud and mesh depending on what you want to use it for we said some people go crazy with 3D printing their models but for us today at gltf will suffice we brought the model into blender and did a minimal cleanup for the vertices that we didn't need then we exported it again in glb remember what we told you guys earlier that after you process your models in polycam you can actually go ahead and customize their textures first we import our model and then we're gonna load in all of the original textures that we received with our polycam download then we're going to take those textures and drop them onto the base color the normal map the roughness and all that respectively well you can always manually painting the details that you want for the sake of speed and efficiency we are going to use the masks that are available within the software this mask will allow you to add different materials based on the actual shape of your model to use these masks we need to help substance painter understand what the shape of our model looks like and that means baking all the texture Maps such as ID ambient occlusion normal map and others once you've done that it is as simple as dropping a preset mask onto your model and then deciding what material will sit on top of it we opted for moss in our case since we're in a forest and you can see how it naturally fills in parts of your mesh depending on the shape of it so we were looking for the best place to showcase the tow Temple and of course the tonopole itself was already located in a forest and that made sense for us to go to epic games and download the Electric Forest sample scene which comes with beautifully scanned trees and plants which was the ideal match for our totem pole within unreal we dropped our model in the scene and then decorated it with some quicksil assets that were already present in our scene now we had the standard cameras that we can control using a sequencer but also we wanted to use our iPhone as a handheld camera to add that manual shake for extra realism we did that using the live link plugin in Unreal Engine and Livelink recap app on our iPhone and then we put all of that in the sequencer and the result was exactly what you saw in the beginning of the video nice if you've made it up until this part of the video and we still haven't convinced you to use photogrammetry let me tell you exactly why we didn't go ahead and just model all of this from scratch let's take the totem pole as an example it belonged to the ancient Hideout Village and it represents family and Clan membership it's filled with intricate details and over the years it's developed fractures cracks and other imperfections that tell a story of its history modeling this by hand would not only take a considerable amount of time but we'd never ever be able to recreate an exact replica of what was once crafted by hand and if all of that still didn't convince you let me tell you that doing photogrammetry was the only time in the past few weeks that they left this house and went Outdoors it was the best excuse to go out have fun explore and still work and now you know exactly how to bring any object of any size into your 3D software you are welcome and make sure you like this video even if you don't like it and only comment beautiful things about us if you leave a bad comment we're going to remove it uh do we want them to subscribe yes yes subscribe so we can make more money and get rich buy some Louis Vuitton and you know Gucci shoes and all that all right I'm done

Channel: Bad Decisions Studio

Views: 16,481

Keywords: Unreal Engine, photogrammetry tutorial, vlogger, vancouver, canada, photogrammetry blender, photogrammetry unreal engine 5, photogrammetry drone, unreal engine 5, unreal engine 5 tutorial, unreal engine tutorials

Id: NhdbfiO5-sM

Length: 15min 17sec (917 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 11 2023