Epic Games is using AI and the Unreal Engine to Do Virtual Photoshoots
Taking Covid-19 safe product photos in completely virtual worlds
Taking Covid-19 safe product photos in completely virtual worlds
Product photography used to be so hard. Especially if you were photographing something big — like a car — you had to hire a film crew, rent a location and secure permits, hire a director, provide and style the actual car itself, likely hire a professional driver, get model releases from everyone involved, get insurance for your shoot, and more. On the day of your shoot, you had to hope all went according to plan, that the weather held out, and that your crew got you the perfect shot.
That’s an expensive and challenging process. And especially during Covid-19, big on-locations shoots are orders of magnitude riskier and more expensive. Getting the perfect shot of your car (or shoe, or other product) could mean putting peoples’ lives at risk, requiring travel that could be avoided, and otherwise jumping through many regulatory and health/safety hoops.
Using artificial intelligence, video game engines, existing stock photography, and virtual production, Epic Games and several other companies are demonstrating a different way to shoot photorealistic product images without going on site. It’s a perfect workflow for the age of coronavirus, and could replace expensive on-site product photography (or even filmmaking) in the not-so-distant future.
To perform virtual photoshoots, Epic and its team of partners begin with the Unreal Engine. The Unreal Engine is the tech behind hundreds of videogames, and is increasingly being used for non-gaming applications, like medical simulations. The team creates a virtual world within the engine, often using existing imagery from specialty stock photography providers like CGI Backgrounds. CGI backgrounds creates “ultra high res domes”, which are extremely high resolution, 360 degree recreations of actual physical spaces.
The team also creates a full 3D model of the product they’re photographing, just as you’d create a 3D model of an object for a videogame. The team places the 3D product model into the virtual world. They can then photograph the virtual object in the virtual world, just as you’d photograph a real object in a real location-based photoshoot.
Technology like real-time rendering from the Unreal engine even allows designers and photographers to reposition virtual objects in the environment, move around a virtual camera, and capture photos of the object with different kinds of lighting, etc. Imagine being a photographer on-location photographing a car at the Grand Canyon — but you also happen to be 200 feet tall (so you can move the car around like a plaything) and able to control the weather, the time of day, and more to ensure that you get the perfect shot.
The photos taken in the virtual environment are so real that customers largely can’t tell them apart from actual photos, taken with a real product at a real location. But because the photoshoot is taking place entirely in a virtual world using AI and 3D rendering tech, there’s far lower costs, no travel, and no Covid-19 risk. Shoots can also happen much faster, and because the designers can control the weather and lighting, they don’t have to worry about nature messing up their shoot.
If this sounds like an early-stage technology that’s mainly an experiment for techie types, thing again. Epic has partnered with Merkley+Partners to perform photoshoots for high-end clients, like several car manufacturers. The image at the top of this article was created and shot entirely within a virtual environment. The background is a real place — captured meticulously by CGI Backgrounds’ photographers — but the car was never actually there. It was added in the Unreal Engine, and photographed entirely in a virtual world.
Virtual photoshoot tech has surged ahead during Covid-19. But it’s likely to persist even after the pandemic. Costs promise to be much lower than with traditional on-location shoots, and customers have complete creative control over how their product shots turn out. If they don’t like a shot, they don’t have to go back on-site to do another photoshoot — they can just edit the virtual environment and try again. That’s another huge cost saving measure.
According to the Economist, “virtual worlds are being used everywhere”. They’re already being used for photoshoots, but in time they’ll likely be used for training doctors and allowing them to practice surgeries, providing realistic environments for soldiers to practice skills, and even shooting full-length feature films.
Epic Games, CGI Backgrounds and Merkley+Partners will be presenting about their work at the 25 annual conference of the Digital Media Licensing Association this week in a session led by Doug Dawirs. I’ll be there, and will be covering the tech in a lot more detail.
Today, virtual photoshoots are a new technology for safely responding to Covid-19. But going forward, they could be the new future of product photography.