IanHubert
patreon
Asset: 33 Low Poly Crowd Figures
🕑 Added 2020-08-02 08:50:44 +0000 UTC
Low poly crowd figures as a dime a dozen online, but almost none of them seem to have any textures??
This is mostly just a test from this evening (version 1), but it gave some handy results until I can do better. Ideally this would be done with more than 3 people, but! Quarantine! What'ch'a gonna do?
Thanks as always to Sean and Kaitlin for being very accommodating models :D
I'm working on the HyperBowl sequence, and I wanted to have crowds standing around, and while I'd usually just put something together using stadium images, I wanted to see if I could come up with something that might be a bit more flexible. The goal kind of being using these guys to fill out the deep background, then ideally some of the higher quality scans as the foreground dudes.
I recently got a drone with the hope of snagging some big landscape photoscans, but it has a "quick orbit" feature, which works alright!! You can pick a point for it to orbit, and it had a little trouble since there were 3 of us, but it worked! I sped up the footage 400% in an editor, so when I exported a jpg sequence I was only using every 4th frame, and the end result in RealityCapture was like 50 cents per 3 folks- not bad!
Also, since it's just instancing the same few low-poly figures, I was able to create 80,000 of them with a particle system without blender breaking a sweat (well. Maybe a bit of a forehead glisten), which means you should be able to instance a ton of these guys even on a laptop.
Oh also- I set up a few hue-randomizers just to keep too many obviously repeating shirts from appearing. It definitely helps hide duplicates, but it also means every color will be slightly off- up to you if you want to keep it.
(Right click, save as:)
-Crowd Asset Blend File
-Crowd FBX (for non-blender folks)
Things I learned:
-Scanning/processing multiple people at once definitely helped as far as time investment, although it obviously introduces occlusions and such, so the scans aren't as good overall.
-I might see if they have a different color profile or something I could shoot in? Something lower contrast? This might just be what I have, though.
-Wear less dark black (gets underexposed then there's no data to work from)
-I set everything to manual (you don't want auto-exposure changing all the values as the camera moves), but I forgot to set the white balance! I think it was on auto- didn't seem to affect much, though.
-I shot in 1080p, even though I think this camera can go to 4k? I'll try 4k next time, even though I'll probably end up downscaling.
-Dark jeans vastly increase the likelihood of legs disappearing (Kaitlin's missing her legs in like half of the scans (I tried to add them back... sometimes)).
-The drone has similar utilities where it'll continuously orbit, and changing the height during that rotation would obviously give a much more complete scan. This one worked well for me also being in the scan, though :D
-This went quick though! Maybe 20 minutes of scanning, then an hour of babysitting RealityCapture?? Definitely excited to do more of these!
Comments
HEY! I love your work, and can't wait for the release of Dynamo Dream! just a quick question. with your assets you have here, are you ok with us sharing them with friends provided we don't sell them or claim credit for the models? or would you prefer we keep them to ourselves? I guess other people have been wondering the same thing too.
Joined now your Patreon. You are great man. I love how you outline the process
Ian Hubert
Ahaha! That's awesome to hear :D
LukeTheNerd
It's getting scary how relevant your posts are to the projects I'm working on.
Pete Burges
Another slice of outstanding value! Thanks Ian.
Ian Hubert
Ahhhh yeah I can totally see that being a problem, if you have, like HALF a hill in your scan, it's hard to blend that into anything else. I think it'd be really hard if you were trying to make an Entire 360 Environment, but maybe for the larger more complex shapes they only really work from a limited angle.
Ian Hubert
Oh mannnnnn I'd love to see how those turned out!! That sounds so slick!
Ian Hubert
They put a LOT of love into that film! I feel like my views on it change pretty drastically every time I watch it, haha Okay now I have to watch it again too.
And I literally told my wife yesterday that I bet I could've just gotten a drone and it would probably solve the same problem much quicker, so thank you for proving me right!
Robert Singler Jr
I've been wanting to do that with a drone for a while!! I can't wait to see all the crazy beautiful landscapes that you produce. My problem has been that I can NEVER seem to piece them all together very well. Like I scanned all these rocks, but unless you get a plane like those "cheatpacks" that you recommended a while ago, the scans just don't ever fit together. Good luck.
After being inspired by your last go at body scanning, I've been teaching myself how to work with an Arduino to build a janky 3d person scanner. It's essentially a big chandelier that I manually wind up by rotating it a ton and then let it naturally spin back to center while a camera points inward at the center of the chandelier. You lower the camera down while it's spinning and you basically get a cylindrical scan from a lot of various heights. Right now I'm using an iPhone 11 cause it was lightweight and I had a bicycle mount for a phone that happened to work with my shitty rig made out of 1' PVC pipe. I should note that the iPhone is recording using an app called ProMovie+ which unlocks the ability to record at higher than usual bitrates and with manual control 'cause you really need to up the shutter speed to make it usable as "stills" when you pull it back apart, but really this should be upgraded to hold a DSLR eventually. Here's a super rough teaser of the contraption I sent to a buddy of mine: https://www.dropbox.com/s/355kbpqn65wces1/SpinScanExplainer.MOV?dl=0 (He worked on The Mandalorian, hence me assuming he's seen the real-deal 360 degree body scan rigs they use in film) Here's what a raw scan looks like in RealityCapture, which shows the iPhone's helical pattern around me as it spins and lowers via the motor: https://www.dropbox.com/s/1psh0zq0htj2qy8/SpinScan_Test3.JPG?dl=0 Right now I've gotten this far with rigging it via Mixamo's auto rigger (Have yet to figure out adapting mocap data via my Vive, but it sounds like Rokoko might have made my life easier there): https://www.dropbox.com/s/vdix34z4g725ezp/ThrillerTest_WideShot.mp4?dl=0 Eventually I'll actually make it less janky, but right now I was able to capture that "as a selfie" -meaning I can scan myself without continuously asking my wife to walk around me for 2 minutes.
I was just curious if you'd tried just whammy jamming the video file directly into reality capture, it works surprisingly well and you can change the ratio of images per video (somewhat) easily...?
This is great! I've been doing the same thing, using my drone to photoscan bits and pieces of the arctic landscape. Piles of rocks, interesting looking patches of ground, and even whole hills or other chunks of terrain and feeding them into Meshroom.
Greg Beaudry
Saw this post at 2 am after just finishing Star Wars Episode 1 because of all the references in yesterday’s videos lol honestly think it’s kind pretty underrated... although I’d love to see a Star Wars produced/directed by Ian! I think that someone needs to find a way to make that happen!
hah I was going to link to the same thing! I saw this here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWqGr5juB_k & played around with it.... after doing about 5 mins in the sculpt tool to make it look better & some UV reprojection, I got a preeeeeeeeeetty pretty good result - definitely usable as a background figure! surely not as fun as flying a drone around yourself to 3D scan, but it can do a decent job with some manual work
fab4_Blender
https://colab.research.google.com/drive/11z58bl3meSzo6kFqkahMa35G5jmh2Wgt?usp=sharing
fab4_Blender
Ian, I don't know if you know this AI that makes a 3D model of a person from a single image. The result is not spectacular, but I think it is close to the requirement that you are going to give it. The only drawback that I see is that then you have to give the texture in Blender directly from the photo through the use of UV projection view, but it is very fast and can help you, I leave the link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FV6nkCkRxM&list=LLN2fLqwIaPin1IhvJ6qWp_g&index=20&t=0s
Of course! The a7III is very powerful and I’m sure if the drone doesn’t quite get you what you need, that Sony should suffice!
Ian Hubert
AH! I've got an A73 too! Slog2's my preferred, as well :D. I shot this on a Mavic drone, though, and I haven't gone deep into the camera settings yet. I assume they have similar options, but it being a drone camera, I wouldn't be surprised if it didn't have quite the dynamic range of the A73. Thanks for the tips! I've never heard of DRO, gotta look into that
Sérgio Merêces
Thanks
Just bought an a7III and what I’ve found is Slog2 is great for dynamic range flat-ish profile shots, and it doesn’t introduce a ton of noise in shadows. If that doesn’t work, the standard “no color profile” mode allows you to turn on DRO “dynamic range optimer” and it’s pretty decent in certain lighting situations. If you use slog2 as your color profile, be sure to set the color gamut to S-gamut 3 Cine in that color profile, gives the best results in my opinion:) 👌🏻
