Importing real world models into a game engine

Question

What are the hardware and software tools required to import physical worlds into a game engine? Can i use a HD camera to do that? What do the popular game engines support?

Answer 1

As far as I know, there are no tools that take images of real-world objects and let you import them into game engines (certainly, no commercial tools that do that). Most game developers use tools like 3D Studio Max or Maya, along with teams of artists, to recreate physical objects in a form that the game engine can use.

There do exist tools that help the process. For example, motion capture can be used to capture animation data about how a person moves, but use of a motion capture studio is typically extremely expensive (thousands of dollars for just a few minutes of captured animation).