Released in 2016 and acquired by Epic Games in 2021, RealityCapture creates accurate meshes of real-world objects, ranging from people and props to environments.
The software is capable of handling very large sets of mixed data, even on laptops and low-performance hardware. It is designed for aerial photogrammetry and urban planning, and is also used in the entertainment industry to create assets utilized in games and VFX projects.
In RealityCapture 1.3, experimental options for unwrapping and texturing models based on mosaic techniques have been introduced. The 'Mosaicing' option reduces the number of individual UV islands generated during the model's automatic unwrapping, reducing the effort required to prepare the model for real-time work. However, this method operates slower than the previous 'Geometric Unwrap' method. Texturing based on 'Mosaicing' efficiently uses a single source photograph to create a texture for each triangle on the mesh, resulting in sharper details in textures.
Among other new features is the direct upload to Nira, a new online platform designed for real-time visualization of massive datasets, such as large 3D scans, enabling online viewing with clients and colleagues. Additionally, the ability to import 3D models in PLY format has been introduced.
This update also brings performance enhancements: model reconstruction is now 'twice as fast,' and texturing is 'three times faster' than in the previous version. Automatic model generation has been improved, streamlining the workflow for creating cleaned and textured models to a 'one-click' process.
RealityCapture 1.3 is available exclusively for Windows. The software relies on CUDA, therefore requiring an Nvidia graphics processor with CUDA 3.0 support to function. The cost of perpetual corporate licenses is $3750. There are also Pay-Per-Input (PPI) pricing options where the software is free, but users purchase credits for processing scanning data, priced at $10 for 3500 credits or $20 for 8000 credits.