Even more 3D

It has been a long time since I have been posting anything at all, it has been a hectic ride! I have been trying to post stuff here but haven’t had the time, but I have been posting “notebook drawings” on instagram.

There are two assignments I have completed, one is about photogrammetry and the other one was the final assignment for 3D2. So lets do this!

First off “Photogrammetry”, but lets us use a easier word; photo scanning!
Ill do a quick explaining for the ones who don’t know what it is, so basically you take a lot of pictures of one objective from different sides and angles, then you put those pictures into a program and allign them together and voila; youve got a 3d object ready. Well actually its not that easy you will have to do some more stuff to get it right and you will get a high poly model that you may want to make a low poly from.

Anyway, the assignment involved scanning an object, putting it in a virtual museum and present it in class. I scanned different objects but they did not turn out good at all, this was due to the problem with shiny surfaces, the software has a  hard time working with refection, so one have to take a lot of pictures to try to make it. I photo scanned an orange and it turned out looking like an orange muffin (I now realize that this I should have taken a picture of it). With nothing working out for me I made a last minute try and photos canned my shoe, and it turned out great!

You can see the level of detail this brings, even if it doesn’t look exactly the same it is pretty close to reality. When photo scanning an object you will get the whole model done for you and also the texture will be put on top of that automatically, you can change the resolution of the texture detail within the software and other small adjustments you want to make. Usually one cant use this kind of high poly object inside a game as it would slow everything down, that is why one should make a low poly model based on the original model and apply the texture on top of the new model.
The things one can do with this kind of technique can be very useful when wanting to present old artifacts, or one can use this program and rebuild an artifact that has been worn out over time, and see how it would have looked back in the days.

So the second assignment involved choosing between modeling a telephone booth or a generator, this would later on be put in a scene and should also be presented in class. This was the hardest thing I have done so far, the amount of work and time put on this made me want to bang my head against a wall, when making this model I had more than 30 files saved if something went wrong (as the software tend to crash a lot and I would have lost two hours of work which happened a lot). And I also rebuilt the model several times, but this made me learn from it a lot too.

So everything i built in the scene is my own stuff;

So I was trying to recreate a street in the middle east, but didn’t manage to deliver the feeling before the deadline. And I got told that it would take a lot of time to achieve, so I modeled the street lights, the asphalt, the pavement and the brick house (which I am not proud of at all, but I liked everything else). I wanted to add dirt and stuff on everything but I never made it that far.

Lets dig deeper into the generator:

The amount of detail I had to think through with this one was giving me a headache, the texture work had to involve making the metal differ from the rubber materials. Most of the smaller details like bolts and smaller vents where done by using normal maps (Height maps giving the illusion that details aren’t flat).
Before handing the assignment in I added a collision box (without it a player can walk right through the model) and a light map (helps the engine saving memory when building the level and thus makes it work faster), that wasn’t that hard to do once you get the hang of it.

This was pretty much the update I had to deliver this time, this education turned out to become pretty difficult and we have a lot to do (Not so much visually to show). I am trying to get some drawing done but haven’t got the time, hopefully ill get the time soon enough, but until then.. ill try to post more.

This was the end of 3D2 and visualization in 3D, next up will be “serious games” and 3D3 and from what I’ve heard, its going to be a hell lot tougher from here.

Meanwhile you can just skim through my instagram here.