from Hacker News

Cesium for Unreal – Bring the Real World to Unreal Engine

by doodlesdev on 1/1/25, 3:57 AM with 56 comments

  • by kbumsik on 1/1/25, 12:23 PM

    It was released around 4 years ago, when I worked at a civil engineering tech startup.

    We had a lot of Cesium 3D tiles of construction sites, captured by drones. It was quite easy to place them to Unreal engine. Is was fun to place random things in the map and mess around it.

  • by fsiefken on 1/1/25, 11:32 AM

    That's amazing, I wonder how well Cesium rendered environments look in VR natively on the Quest3 and how photogrametry compares to for example the Light Fields experience wise https://store.steampowered.com/app/771310/Welcome_to_Light_F...

    Light Fields camera tech produces dynamic reflections due to capturing and interpolating reality itself, I wonder how well this can be simulated with Cesium Photogrammetry and the Unreal VR pipeline so you don't need an expensive Light Fields camera to produce similar realistic static VR scenes.

  • by ksec on 1/1/25, 6:32 PM

    On one hand it is great Unreal is being used in many places outside Gaming from VR, VFX, Movie production or anything to do with 3D / Photorealistic Graphics.

    On the other hand there are some recent backlash suggesting these direction and default in Unreal is making games look worst. [1] [2] And Nanite may not be the silver bullet we were looking for.

    [1] https://www.vg247.com/unreal-engine-5-has-been-a-disappointm...

    [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJu_DgCHfx4

  • by Stevvo on 1/1/25, 12:15 PM

    Way too expensive to be useful for anything.

  • by vouaobrasil on 1/1/25, 1:28 PM

    Why do people strive to create such realistic environments when they're a much more realistic world outside? Although I understand the purpose from a fantastical-escapist perspective, I wonder if this sort of increasingly realistic escapism actually is reflective of how we're making the real world far worse than it ever was before and we're preparing an alternative world to escape into due to our destructive tendencies.