Epic Games’ new mobile app turns your photos into 3D models

Developing games is not easy, especially if you’re a small indie developer where you’re the developer, social media manager, graphic artist, audio engineer, and CEO, all at the same time.

Creating 3D models for your games can be difficult and time-consuming, especially if you’re not familiar with the process, but Epic Games could soon make things a lot easier. The company has developed a new app that will be able to take your photos and transform them into 3D models.

The tech behind it actually belonged to a company called Capturing Reality, whom Epic acquired last year. The company’s specialty was an app called RealityCapture (now called RealityScan) that uses laser scanning to take images of objects in real-life and convert them into 3D assets.

The processing of the images will actually be done in the cloud via the RealityScan servers, meaning that you don’t really need to worry about whether or not your phone can handle the rendering. Once the processing is complete, users will also be able to export the scan to Sketchfab.

At the moment, the app is in beta and the beta is only available to iOS users, but there are plans to launch an Android version later this year, so if you’re someone who develops games or wants to use 3D assets for augmented or virtual reality, then this is an app that you might want to keep an eye out for.