Macula.
Scans that move.

Quick start

The whole guide uses the same scan: a garden with two friends raising a toast, captured with a phone and trained as gaussian splats (720,000 splats).

1Import a scan

Drop the file into the Content Browser. The import window opens with settings that suit most files: leave them as they are the first time.

Splats are sorted at import from the most to the least visible. That is why you can lower the density later without holes: the important ones are always drawn first.

2Place it in the level

Drag the asset into the viewport. Click on the scan to select it: the Details panel shows the Macula buttons right under Transform, then the performance and look settings.

3DGS scenes often arrive tilted, in the frame of the first photo of the capture. Rotate the actor until the ground is flat.

3Prepare

Frame the viewport the way you want the shot, then click 1. Prepare. It gets the scene ready and stops there:

• Macula Look: a post process with a black background, bloom, vignette and grain;
• Macula Camera: a vertical 9:16 camera where your viewport was, with the same zoom. It stays still: key it when you want it to move;
• a Level Sequence of 10 seconds with the camera cut, opened in Sequencer. Make it longer or shorter like any sequence.

No effect, nothing animated. The scene is yours.

4Add effects

Select the scan and click 2. Add Effect. You get a Macula Field, a zone plus an effect, like a mask with a feather:

• a Sphere placed where the viewport looks, at the depth of the scan;
• a Radius, a Feather and an Effect Scale worked out from the distance of the scan, so a bust up close and people in a garden both start right;
• only this scan is affected, and the new effect is selected.

Then it is your call:

1. Pick a Preset. The zone you have stays, the look goes inside it.
2. Move and scale the sphere with the gizmo, or change its Shape (Box, Line...).
3. Key Strength with the diamond next to it: 0 where the effect starts, 1 where it is full. Key Radius or the position to make it travel.
4. Click 2. Add Effect again for the next one. Each effect is its own actor: copy it, hide it, delete it.

The settings that matter

Zones are masks

Use as many effects as you like, each with its own shape, feather and look. Here a small Sphere with a 25 cm feather sits on one head, with the Pin Art preset: only that head turns into cubes, the cubes fade out towards the neck.

• Sphere: a face, a hand, a spot on the ground.
• Box: a person, a wall, a room.
• Line: along an arm, a road, a stroke. Rotate and scale the actor to draw it.
• Invert: everything except the zone.

Drag the handle to compare the scan with and without Pin Art, a sphere zone that grows from the two people over the whole lawn:

ScanPin Art ⇆

Looks

A few of the 36 presets on the garden scan, as they ship:

Camera distance

Auto Show, for a quick test

Auto Show does Prepare plus a Director: a series of effects one after the other, on a beat, with the camera bubble and a slow push in. Handy to see what a scan can do in ten seconds. To work on your own shot, use Prepare and Add Effect instead, or delete the Director and keep the camera and the sequence.

Render

• Movie Render Queue renders exactly what you see in Sequencer. Set Anti-aliasing to None with 4 temporal samples.
• Splats write depth where they are solid, so depth of field, fog and TSR treat them like geometry. Keep the aperture at f/5.6 or more for clean edges around people: a very shallow focus blurs the soft splat edges into a halo.
• Several scans in the same level are sorted together, so a character scanned alone blends right into a scanned place.
• Meshes hide splats and splats hide meshes: mix your scan with any Unreal scene.

Settings of the scan