Photogrammetry Test 5 - Apple Void Shooting Part 1

 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 wrapped with black foam. This was also stood on my turntable so I could move the subject around easier.

    So below are some of the resulting photos I managed to take, this was my first time using a ring flash and it took me a while to shoot the photos, I captured around 130 photos of the apple, from 3 different angles.






    So something I wasn't able to do as I lacked the equipment necessary was to cross polarise the light from the ring flash with the camera lens in order to remove specular lighting from the subject. This process involves using a polarising lens cap as well as a polarizing filter on the ring flash, which would need to be custom made for the ring flash. This is time and money I didn't have to spend just yet so I am trying to work with what I have at my disposal in order to achieve some kind of result.

    From previous experience I understood that because the foam tube was lit as much as the apple itself, then RealityCapture would have a hard time distinguishing the points of capture and because it isn't all one subject on complete black then it just wouldn't process a good result. 

    This time I bit the bullet and went through all 130 photos and manually masked out the apple from the tube and the background and just filled it with a solid black background.




    This was a very time consuming process which I had tried to automate within photoshop as an action and then batch run it on each photo, however photoshop had a hard time selecting just the apple as the subject and removing everything else cleanly. As such to avoid major issues in RealityCapture I went through each photo and remove everything but the apple.

    Since this was such a time consuming and straining task I decided to test the masked photos when I hit the 50 mark, to ensure that there was enough data for Reality Capture to work from and also to make sure that I wasn't again wasting my time by doing this.




    The above images show what the model looked like at 50 images, thankfully my hard work was starting to pay off and I had achieved something a lot more consistent than my previous attempts. With this I was also beginning to understand RealityCapture a little better.

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