A scene from Quixel's Rebirth film.
A scene from Quixel's Rebirth film.
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Epic Games acquires photogrammetry startup Quixel to make games more realistic

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 3 min

Epic Games announced it has acquired Quixel, a startup that created a huge “photogrammetry” asset library of real world imagery that can be used in animated films or video games.

Back in March during the Epic Games event at the Game Developers Conference, Quixel demoed a cinematic short film Rebirth that looked like it was someone taking a video of a landscape with a video camera. Only it was an animation using Epic Games’ Unreal Engine.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.