MA Games Design Blog - Lance Muir

 Photogrammetry Test 5 - Apple Void Shooting Part 3     Today I moved on to the final steps of getting this model into a render ready state, or a game ready state if I had simplified the mesh even further.     I first took the model into Maya in order to reorient and resize the model properly.     Also at this point I decided to fix the issue with the underside of the mesh which can be seen in previous posts. Unfortunately I forgot to screenshot this process, however I used the sculpting tools in Maya to smooth the surface down as the geometry in that area was little bumpy, for lack of a better term. I then used the Remesh feature in Maya to redistribute the triangles of the mesh as the area was lacking poly definition compared to the rest of the mesh. This brought the model's final count down to around 170,000 triangles. Which again I could have potentially reduced further but since I wanted to test the model I didn't want to ruin the geometry. I...

  Photogrammetry Test 5 - Apple Void Masking     Since yesterday was such a taxing day of setting up and getting quality images and then having to manually mask out them one at a time I decided to continue with the rest today and then put them all back into RealityCapture and hope the extra information from the rest of the photos was enough to get a quality result.      Like I said previously there were around 130 photos in total and I stopped masking at the 50 mark, so I still had another 80 or so photos to manually mask out, which as expected took a few hours to achieve. But I got it all done and it was time to put it into Reality Capture to see the results.     I am over the moon with the results I managed to get from putting in the effort and ensuring that each photo was masked out. It may seem so simple to some that it's just a 3D model of an Apple but countless attempts have been made by myself to create something that is worth it and seemin...

  Photogrammetry Test 5 - Apple Void Shooting     So after the outdoor shooting of the Nike Jordan and with the weather once again shifting back to extreme wind and rain that won't let up, making it impossible to do any outdoor shooting, I decided I needed to try and perfect the indoor photography setup. I managed to find a relatively affordable ring flash on Amazon which I expected to work better than my previous lighting setups.     I also decided to pick an apple as the subject this time as I had caught a video on youtube explaining that the best indoor setup is to shoot on black to make the subject appear as it is floating in the "void", in the video they used an apple as one of their subjects and so I thought if I could attempt the same thing then hopefully I might be able to compare the results.     Above is a photo of my very rudimentary setup. I had draped black cloth behind the subject and placed the apple on top of a cardboard tube that I had...

  Photogrammetry Outdoor Shooting     So today the weather finally cleared up enough to where I could attempt some outside shooting to see if I could yield better results with the photogrammetry and try to recreate some of the processes I have seen in the many youtube tutorials I have watched on the subject.     I opted for the Nike Jordan shoe again just as I already have an reference of how it can go completely wrong and so I wanted to be able to compare the results through this next experimental phase.     Unfortunately since I was on a time frame while I still had the light on my side I didn't get a shot of the setup, however below are some of the raw photos I took to give an idea of how it was setup.     I set the shoe up on my camera tripod, which in hindsight was not the best shooting platform but it sufficed enough as I just needed to elevate the shoe off the ground. As you can see from the above images the lighting was pretty optimal...

  The Future of Art Production in Games     Today I managed to find a really good talk on the GDC vault from 2018, the speaker is Andrew Maximov of Naughty Dog and in the talk he brings up optimisation automation within game art, along with talking about the use of photogrammetry and 3D scanning within the industry.      This talk, while short, hits a lot of good points and is exactly what I was looking for in terms of help for writing the context review of my essay.      Maximov talks about the benefits and downsides of photogrammetry and expands on this subject in terms of photogrammetry being used en masse. Due to the fact its cheaper and less time consuming to create realistic assets using scan data. He also further on talks about photogrammetry maybe being the main route for smaller indie studios to be able to achieve their visions in a more realistic manner and that the triple A , larger studios may delve back into more stylised games i...

Photogrammetry Test 3.5 - Naruto Pop Figure      Just a quick update when going back to the very first video I watched on photogrammetry from 3D forensics, I realised he actually used a different software called 3DF Zephyr, which I have been able to acquire a free 30 day trial of.      I decided to quickly run my previous images into the software, however because this software relies on masking the subject out first the black background was actually a detriment to the process and didn't provide the cleanest masks.     Now unfortunately as I suspected the images were just not suitable for 3DF Zephyr to calculate a proper mesh from, mainly due to the black background is what I am assuming, however the process of using 3DF Zephyr felt a lot easier to understand than using Reality Capture.      As you can see the results are nowhere near ideal, but in 3D Forensics video he shot in a static position moving the model but against a complet...

  Photogrammetry Test 3 - Naruto Pop Figure     After doing more research and looking through more youtube videos I realised that if I wanted to use a static camera I had to then use a completely black background in order to trick Reality Capture into believing that the camera is moving and not the object. Previously I had either used a white background or the environmental background. The main issue I'm facing is that to attempt this in a very amateur studio setup I lack the right lighting equipment and I am trying to make do with what I have so even these failed experiments are teaching me new ways of shooting, however the best setup would to be have a ring flash mounted to the camera so that I could remove all of the shadow and reflection information and that way it should actually work as intended in Reality Capture.     Because of the lighting setup again I didn't get the best results in Reality Capture even after trying to alter various settings within the...

  Photogrammetry Test 2 - Nike Jordans     Now unfortunately I didn't take any behind the scenes photos of the way in which I set this up however I decided to take a different approach to testing out this object with Reality Capture. I chose to move away from the Razer Seiren as it didn't have much visual information for Reality Capture to use and it was a poor model to start with. The Nike Jordan Shoe has colour, dirt, wear, etc... so it has a lot of variation and points of reference.  I set the Nike up on a rotating turntable just against my desk and used video capture this time instead of just photo capture. This process was significantly faster than manually turning the object and taking a photo each time.  I then loaded this into Reality Capture and the software broke the video down frame by frame into separate images and I attempted to use this new information to generate a point cloud. The process ended up being much better than I expected as this was jus...