This is a rock.
But this man is not a geologist.
My name is Galen.
I work as a Producer and Evangelist here for Quixel at Epic Games.
Video game developer Epic Games makes games like Fortnite, but they're as
well known for Unreal Engine, the ever-evolving game engine for a ton
of video games and other industries that use 3D, from Hollywood movies.
to demos for architecture.
That's part of why Epic Games Studio Quixel sends people here — because
getting high resolution scans of rocks like these represents an
evolution in making video games and all three-dimensional art.
Where actually were you, when you were doing these scans?
The areas specifically that we spent the most time in is an area called Hurrah Pass.
And Hurrah Pass, um, takes about 90 minutes
to get to at least where we were scanning to. And in an off-road
capacity, pavement stops.
There's sheer drop-offs, it's really sketchy for lack of a better way to put it.
And since we're so far off the grid, we didn't bring a
generator or anything like that.
We would just scan until the batteries would go completely dead.
Galen is out there searching for rocks that might look good for Epic's tech demo,
set on a moody, slightly alien landscape.
In this clip, Galen is taking high resolution pictures of this rock from
a bunch of different angles.
The tent keeps light even — no hard shadows. On the back,
he's got a battery pack to keep going longer and on the
ground, there's a scale marker
so he'll know how big the boulder is.
These pictures are pulled into software, then they're stitched
together into a 3D model.
The software figures out what a complete rock looks like, from
the common points in the picture.
All this makes up a scanned asset.
The Quixel team did a similar process for big structures by capturing via
drone, and for textures by photographing a rock wall and capturing the canyon
floor. Making them can be pretty hard work.
You walk into an area and you think, oh, this is awesome.
And then you start breaking it down, thinking about what's actually going
to be useful, and it's becomes less awesome very quickly. Mostly just
because of the time, you know, the time constraints like, oh, well I could shoot
that, but I mean, is it the best use of
the few hours we have left today, you know? But shifting that time
to Quixel and other scanners and then distributing their work
saves time for individual video game designers. And the treacherous
highlights of the canyons of Utah are available for download and insertion into your own game.
In the past, artists had to manually make these assets and textures,
sometimes pixel by pixel.
These days, you might sculpt your own assets using special software.
Sometimes it works better than others.
"I guess it's a face?" Downloading textures and models from a cloud
marketplace, cuts that out of the workflow.
They aren't just photos.
For example, they include additional images like this normal map, which uses
color to tell the program how high or low certain parts of an image should be.
And you can even remix and customize assets
once you have them
The example that I always use
whenever I'm describing the library and the things that we do is how
many times do you, as an artist need to remake that brick wall?
There are a lot of ways to get pretty good 3d stuff.
Part of what's exciting about all this technology is that pretty
much anyone can make a high quality 3D scan and get assets
using stuff as simple as their phone. You can use professional stuff like
Reality Capture, or honestly your own phone might get you 70% of the way there.
Do I look cool right now?
I feel so cool.
But for a rich environment
it's easier to just download something.
PolyHaven provides a lot of textures and models that work across many
programs for free. Quixel offers high quality assets free to use in
Unreal and for a fee in other programs.
And while I'm able to scan a local rock, developers, can't always go to Utah
or another one of Quixel's biomes, which range from rainforests to Tundras.
Suddenly everyone can make their game in alien planet without having to draw it.
Even though I'm not in the desert, it is super hot right now.
And sometimes developers just want to sit at their desk or make guys
like Galen be the ones who have to trek out and eat lunch in the desert
"Quick sam', you know what I mean?
Double cheese."
For Epic, these scans and textures were collected in part for that
technology demo of the company's graphics, supercharged Unreal Engine 5.
It's a flywheel for Epic games and Quixel, where scans make
Unreal Engine better and a better.
Unreal Engine means more Unreal Engine games, which means more people want to
add scans that work with Unreal Engine.
That also means it is eminently practical to send a crew of non-geologists deep
into the desert to photograph rocks.