CD PROJEKT RED surprised fans at this year’s State of Unreal showcase by revealing an early look at The Witcher 4 running in Unreal Engine 5. While the return to the Witcher universe created plenty of excitement, what truly caught everyone’s eye was the environment—an incredibly lifelike forest filled with rugged terrain, tangled roots, and natural formations that looked as if they had been lifted straight from the real world.
Much of that authenticity came from RealityScan, Epic’s advanced photogrammetry tool that transforms real-world objects into high-fidelity 3D assets.
Capturing Nature for a Fantasy World
The tech demo follows Ciri as she journeys through the northern region of Kovir, a location never before seen in the franchise. To bring this new environment to life, CD PROJEKT RED sent teams into actual forests to capture rocks, trees, roots, and ground elements using RealityScan. The goal was simple: build a fantasy world grounded in real-world detail.
By integrating RealityScan into their pipeline, the studio was able to reproduce the irregularities and natural chaos found in authentic landscapes—something that traditional asset creation often struggles to achieve.
The Challenge of Recreating Nature
Developers know all too well that nature is unpredictable. Surfaces are uneven, shapes are complex, and lighting conditions change constantly. Replicating that complexity digitally is time-consuming and often requires multiple rounds of cleanup and refinement.
Among the biggest challenges are:
• Large or uneven datasets that don’t align cleanly
• Manual masking to remove unwanted background elements
• Slowdowns in quality checks for huge batches of scans
CD PROJEKT RED needed a solution that could capture organic detail without introducing workflow bottlenecks—and that’s where RealityScan 2.0 proved essential.
Why RealityScan 2.0 Became the Studio’s Go-To Tool
For The Witcher 4 Tech Demo, the team used RealityScan 2.0 to document dense natural elements directly from unprepared outdoor environments. This meant dealing with shadows, clutter, overlapping tree roots, and unpredictable lighting conditions.
RealityScan 2.0 streamlined the process with features tailor-made for field capture:
AI Masking that speeds up cleanup
Normally, removing backgrounds from objects like roots, stones, or moss-covered pieces can take hours. RealityScan’s AI-driven masking automatically separated the objects from their surroundings, even in complex forest scenes. This allowed the team to skip tedious manual cleanup and move straight into production.
By combining detailed real-world scanning with the power of Unreal Engine 5, CD PROJEKT RED created a demo environment that feels both fantastical and grounded in reality—a glimpse of what the next generation of The Witcher may look like.
