3D scanning

13 Jan 2015

Car scanning with Photogrammetry

A new technique we have been working on for scanning full colour reflective objects using photogrammetry.

This is our second test and there is still a lot of room for improvement, objects with multiple reflective layers such as headlights are a problem as you can see from the mesh but we should be able to solve this in the coming weeks.

For the purposes of this test we deliberately chose the hardest possible car to scan, reflective white paintwork, multicolored livery and lots of pure black shiny plastic, a photogrammetry nightmare to say the least!

We’re using AGI PhotoScan to process over 480 images resulting in nearly 1,000,000 Tie points and a Dense point cloud of 168,000,000 points

Once the scan is processed we end up with a fully textured 3D model consisting of about 11 million triangles, As I mentioned before there are still some issues with the lights and there is a lot of noise in and around hard to scan areas such as under the arches and along the bottom of the diffuser.

Uncategorized

30 Jun 2014

150 x 3D Expression Scans avaliable to buy now

We have just uploaded 150 x new expression scans to our 3D scan store, you can buy them individually or as a pack click the link below or one of the images to go to the store.

http://www.3dscanstore.com/

3D scanning

05 May 2014

War Thunder 3D Body and head scanning

Client :: Realtime UK

Project Brief :: Full body Dynamic pose character scanning

Realtime UK came to us early last year with the expressed aim of creating some of the most visually stunning and realistic characters ever seen in a computer generated cinematic. Using our 80 x DSLR photogrammetry rig we captured over 20 different high res body and head scans with various poses and expressions.

Tank commander escaping from his exploding tank.

Close up texture details and unwrapped UV map

We also captured A Pose scans which were then rigged and animated by Realtime.

As he appeared in the cinematic

Some shots from the day

Capturing this seated pose required a quick rebuild of the scanner mid session. We wanted to make sure we could get the most out of every available camera.

We captured the pilots head with his helmet and goggles on, Obviously there was issues with the glass in the goggles. This was removed by us and Realtime later replaced it with their own glass mesh.

Here you can see how AGI photoscan uses all 80 of our cameras to create a dense mesh and high res texture map from a point cloud.

We also provided a full re topology service for close up shots of the heads, including eyes teeth and tongue.

An example of a raw high res expression scan

In order to capture truly realistic expressions we had a lot of the actors screaming and shouting in the studio capturing split second mid pose scans as quickly as we could. The German Navy commander below is a perfect example of this.

High Res head scans were used to replace the lower resolution facial scans that were captured at the same time as the body. Below you can see an example of the body scan with the above head scan used for the close up shot.

One of the Tank crew members vaulting off his exploding tank, this was a particularly hard pose to capture due to the larger scanning volume required to get all his limbs in every shot.

How he appears in the cinematic

3D scanning

07 Feb 2014

Prosthetic Scanning

Another prosthetic scan captured on set at the BBC sound stage in Chepstow, Wales for Vine FX. Rendered using modo and an excellent free HDRI from Dutch Skies, Download HDRI here. Click the image above for a larger view.

Grey scan Zbrush Grab of the bust created by the world renowned Mark Coulier

3D scanning

28 Aug 2013

Skin Shading in Unity

So today we had a quick play around with the PreIntergrated Skin Shader in Unity. Using one of our older head scans as a test subject.

The shader its self is very easy to setup, simply load in the demo scene replace the head with what ever model you intend to use and copy the material over, then its simply a case replacing the maps and tweaking the settings to suit your model. You can have a look at the settings we used here

You can also download a the compiled scene and have a look yourself.

Download Unity Skin demo here 115MB

And because we are feeling especially generous today you can also download the 3D scan and all the textures including the Pre-Intergrated Skin maps used here. The file includes ::

Head Scan ZTL with all subdivision levels and Diffuse colour map
Level 2 frozen OBJ with Normal and colour maps
Level 3 frozen OBJ with Normal and Colour maps
Decimated high res OBJ with colour map
Pre-Integrated Skin Shader maps

Download Model and Textures 237 MB

Enjoy! and if you do anything cool with it please let us know.

Game Development

11 Jul 2013

New full colour full body scans on the store

We are proud to announce the release of our first batch of full body scans on our 3dscan store. There are 3 versions available to suit all budgets.

Click here to go to the store

Basic Version no colour £20 ::
Perfect reference for sculpting and anatomy study

Decimated OBJ, 750k polygon 3D scan “No Colour map”

Colour Version £30 ::
Everything you need to create the perfect full colour photo realistic character

Uv mapped Decimated OBJ, 750k polygon model with UV map
5,000 x 5000 colour map (jpg)

Pro Version £45 ::
For those of you who want a little bit more, this version has everything!

Full high resolution Zbrush model with 5 subdivision levels compatible with Zbrush 4R5 and above
Low poly quadded mesh with normal 8,000 x 8000 normal map for quick renders
Decimated OBJ, 750k polygon model with UV map
10,000 x 10,000 colour map (.jpg)

3D scanning

25 Jun 2013

Full Body 3D Scanning using 80 x DSLR’s

This is the first test using our 80 x Canon DSLR full body scanning system. We are able to capture any pose in full colour in approximately 1/10,000th of a second. With this being our first test there is definitely room for improvement in terms of texture quality and capture volume.

Our custom built scanning rig

Using 80 cameras gives us an immense amount of texture detail.

3D scanning

06 Mar 2013

360 Degree 3D head scanning

We have upgraded our Agisoft photogrammetry rig with a further 12 cameras giving us a total of 30 x canon’s

These are our first tests capturing a full 360 degree head in 1/10,000th of a second the camera layout still needs some tweaking but these early tests are very encouraging. The new version of Agisoft has an incredible mosaic texture blending allowing for super crisp high res textures, this combined with properly unwrapped UV’s gives some amazing results.

3D scanning

27 Feb 2013

Scanning an environment with Agisoft

This is a very simple environment scanning test using a single camera and Agi PhotoScan, I know its been done before 1000 times but the results are very encouraging.

Point cloud view in Agi, again this was a quick test and amounted to nothing more than a few shots with a DSLR. Next time we do this we are going to try a multi camera approach to try and capture an entire section of the environment with one shot.

We didn’t take any top down shots of the rock hence the horrible sky coloured bubble.

The texture maps are average baked at 7,000 x 7,000 for this example, they are not bad but poor lighting on the day means there is a lot of baked in shadow.

It really is a very easy thing to do, it should be interesting to see how far we can push it. Being able to capture a clean detailed textured environment has so many potential applications Imagine a photo realistic environment like this running in unity with an oculus rift, watch this space 🙂

3D scanning

22 Feb 2013

Skin shading in Modo

Or resident Modo artist Ross Mansfield has been slowly converting us all to Modo. Having always used Lightwave 3D for rendering switching over wasn’t much of a problem. One thing that is immediately noticeable is the ease of which you can get incredible looking renders in little to no time. This is our first skin shader test, bearing in mind no one in the studio has ever used it for skin shading before this test took about 2 hours from start to finished. Simply incredible software!

We used one of our full body colour scans from the scan store as a test subject. with a few simple epidermal / subdermal / spec and bump maps we managed to achieve some great results

3D scanning

Tag : 3D scanning