RealityScan

The photogrammetry engine formerly called RealityCapture, free below a one million dollar revenue line

As of 1 September 2026, RealityScan has a free plan and paid plans start at $1250/year. Epic Games renamed RealityCapture to RealityScan in 2025. Softwr lists it under CAD. RealityScan is made by Epic Games, Inc., available on Windows.

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Overview

What RealityScan does

RealityScan turns photographs and laser scans into textured meshes and point clouds. It is the same engine that was sold as RealityCapture by Capturing Reality, a Slovak company Epic Games acquired in 2021, rebranded to RealityScan with version 2.0 in 2025 and updated through 2.1 later that year. It is known for processing speed on large image sets and for handling mixed photographic and laser scan input in one alignment, which is why cultural heritage, film and survey users pick it over slower alternatives. The licensing change is the commercial story. Epic moved RealityCapture to a model where it is free for companies and individuals with annual revenue below one million US dollars, and 1,250 dollars per seat per year above that, with the option to take it inside an Unreal Engine subscription at 1,850 dollars per seat per year. The old pay-per-input and perpetual arrangements have gone for new buyers; existing perpetual licence holders keep what they bought and were given twelve months of updates from version 1.4, after which continuing to update means accepting the new terms. For a two-person survey practice this took the software from a metered cost to zero, and that is the change that moves it onto shortlists it was previously priced out of. Buyers are photogrammetry specialists, survey and heritage practices, game and film asset teams, and increasingly small construction reality-capture operators. The trade-off is Windows-only, an NVIDIA CUDA dependency, and an interface that assumes you already understand alignment, control points and reconstruction regions.

What people use it for

A two-person heritage survey practice under the revenue threshold that can now run professional photogrammetry at no licence cost
A film or games asset team scanning props and environments at very high image counts where processing speed decides the schedule
A survey firm combining terrestrial laser scans with drone photography and needing both aligned in a single reconstruction
A construction reality-capture operator producing meshes for Unreal-based client visualisation from the same source imagery

Where it falls short

Concrete and checkable, so you can decide whether any of them matter to you. This is the half of a review a vendor will not write about RealityScan.

The free tier is bounded by company revenue rather than by usage, so a business crossing one million US dollars of turnover acquires a per-seat cost overnight for software its workflow now depends on
New perpetual licences are no longer sold, so an organisation that deliberately avoided subscription software has no route in; existing perpetual holders keep their version but stop receiving updates unless they accept the current terms
It is Windows only and needs an NVIDIA CUDA capable GPU, which excludes macOS studios and makes the real cost of adoption a workstation purchase rather than a licence
The rename from RealityCapture to RealityScan in 2025 means tutorials, forum answers and third party pipeline documentation are split across two names and several licensing regimes, and much of it is now wrong about price
The interface assumes photogrammetry knowledge; alignment failures, control point placement and reconstruction region setup are not guided, so a team without an experienced operator produces poor models quickly rather than good ones slowly

Cross-shopped

What people choose instead of RealityScan

Each pairing was judged by two reviewers asking whether a buyer would genuinely weigh the two against each other. The ones that failed were deleted rather than published.

RealityScanvs
Pix4D
Pix4D: If you need survey-grade reporting and accuracy documentation rather than raw reconstruction speed
RealityScanvs
Matterport
Matterport: If you want interior capture with a hosted viewer instead of a desktop reconstruction engine
RealityScanvs
Twinmotion
Twinmotion: If your output is client-facing visualisation rather than a measured mesh

Pricing

What RealityScan costs

Taken from the vendor's own pricing page. Prices move, so check before you buy.

Free tier

Free

For individuals and companies with annual revenue under 1,000,000 USD
Full application, no metered input charges
Epic account required
You must move to a paid seat once you cross the revenue threshold

RealityScan seat

$1,250 /yr

Required once annual revenue exceeds 1,000,000 USD
Per seat, per year
Commercial use without output restrictions
Subscription only, no new perpetual licences

Unreal Engine subscription

$1,850 /yr

Per seat per year
Includes RealityScan and Twinmotion
For teams that also need Unreal Engine for non-game commercial use

Capabilities

Features

Photogrammetric reconstruction
Meshes and point clouds generated from photographs at high image counts
Laser scan fusion
Terrestrial laser scans aligned together with photography in one project
Ground control points
Survey control imported to place the model in a real coordinate system
Texturing and unwrapping
High resolution texture generation with UV unwrapping for downstream use
Command line interface
Batch processing scriptable for repeatable production pipelines
Unreal Engine path
Direct export into Unreal for visualisation and simulation work
Component alignment control
Manual control point placement to force alignment where automatic matching fails

Answered, with sources

Questions people ask

Each answer names the page it came from, so you can check it rather than take our word for it.

Is RealityCapture still called that?

No. Epic rebranded it to RealityScan with version 2.0 in 2025. It is the same engine and the same team.

Who gets it free?

Individuals and companies with annual revenue under one million US dollars. Above that, a seat is 1,250 US dollars per year.

Can I still buy a perpetual licence?

Not for new purchases. Existing perpetual licences remain valid for the version owned, with updates only under the current terms.

Does the free version restrict output?

No output metering or watermarking; the restriction is on who qualifies, based on company revenue, not on what you export.

Keep looking

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Softwr does not host reviews and shows no star rating for RealityScan, because a rating we did not collect is not ours to publish. What is here is the pricing and platform detail from the vendor’s own pages, limitations we could state concretely, and alternatives a reviewer confirmed people weigh against it. Tell us if any of it is wrong.

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