13 March 2018

Photogrammetry in Unity

Photogrammetry is the process of using multiple photos of the real-world objects to author game-ready assets. It’s best suited to objects that are time-consuming to produce in 3D sculpting software. Photogrammetry allows you to get a qualitative result, but requires a very high texture resolution to conserve details. This is unpractical for game authoring due to memory budget, and it doesn’t allow you to add any variation to the object.


Unity 2018.1 beta introduced a preview of Scriptable Render Pipeline. Two built-in render pipelines will be released with Unity 2018.1: the Lightweight (LW) Render Pipeline and High-Definition (HD) Render Pipeline. HD Pipeline provides a shader dedicated to photogrammetry material authoring name: LayeredLit. At the start, the photogrammetry process can seem to be hard to manage, but the result is worth it.

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