IanHubert patreon

Photogrammetry Madness - nature stuff

🕑 Added 2020-05-29 08:18:17 +0000 UTC

Comments

Hey Ian. Just trying to touch all you have here, and is quite impressive. Hope to have enough time to actually learn all you share with us. Right now I am trying to photoscan some models, furniture and people. An I am so disappointed of my results. I use PPI reality capture and even if in Reality Capture the models looks decent when I export it, is so bad that can't use it. Not even from far away, not to mention close shots. So, my question is, how you manage to clean the model to actually use for people, and GRASS ?? Grass? Well, that is SF for me to scan trees and grass.. I know how to use the RC, I know how to make the pictures, I have a canon 50mpx and I made more than 300 pics for a model. As I said, it looks super decent in RC, but in Blender all my models sucks from close range :(

bluefire

You have a HUGE backyard! Kind of reminds me of Joseph Drust's backyard jokes. (from pixologic)

Ian Hubert

OH DANG! That's awesome, thanks for that!! Yeah I usually just speed up the footage and export an image sequence in a video editor (in the video I just posted I did it in blender), but that seems way more direct, thanks! :D

Mario Taylor

Thank you! That's really cool and so much easier and quicker too! I will try it as soon as I can. :) Oh, and maybe this doesn't help anyone and everyone already know how to, but I had no clue how to extract every 4th frame from a video but I figured that ffmpeg probably could do it, so I experimented and ffmpeg -i "video.mp4" -vf select='not(mod(n\,4))' -vsync vfr image%03d.jpg worked like a charm. (Change file extensions to the preferred choice, ffmpeg can handle most stuff.)

Ian Hubert

Thanks, Mario! In a pinch, you can actually get pretty good results with the average phone camera (having good lighting is important), but in general I use a Sony A73. ACTUALLY, I'm going to talk about it more in a bit here, but I'm started just filming 1080 footage while walking around the subject and using every 4th frame or so, and getting REALLY good results with that technique.

Mario Taylor

Your Blender Fu is unparalleled, Ian! The creativity and knowledge conveyed on this page is crazy inspiring! Thank you! I'm curious, what camera equipment do you use for photogrammetry and green screen stuff?

Tom Nicholas

@Faust that's great advice thank you! I definitely will check that out :)

Tom Nicholas

Thanks so much!! I absolutely love what you're doing

Zeke Faust

Tom, you should check out Gleb Alexandrov's bcon talk about The Secret of Making High-Quality Art. He goes over this issue of details as it relates to the viewers perception, and beautifully explains the concepts of primary secondary and tertiary shapes.

Ian Hubert

Ah thanks! And totally yeah- I've got to upload another one of the "making a shot" videos pretty quick here. I'll try to focus specifically on that :D

Ian Hubert

Oh totally! Yeah, it's usually fairly basic, but I can show you the kind of general setup :D

Tom Nicholas

I would appreciate this as well!

Tom Nicholas

This looks great!! I've really enjoyed your last more long-form tutorials. The only thing I'd love a bit more in-depth stuff on, as a beginner myself, is the workflow for making these really huge detailed scenes. No matter how much stuff I scatter around buildings and streets and such, I can never get it looking as detailed or just generally visually interesting as most Blender stuff I've seen. Just general help on filling a scene with detail, like the ones we saw in the beginning of the boat modelling tutorial or the one from the steam assets video, would be wonderful!

Aman Bhargava

This looks gorgeous Ian! Can't believe that this is Eevee. I know you get a ton of requests with each post but would be possible for you to cover your lighting workflow some time down the line?

Lukas Sprehn

I've heard and also seen that sculpting in VR is supposedly way more natural-feeling. You should totally try it. You know, one day we'll be doing stuff like that with gloves with so many points of haptic feedback that it feels 100% real!

Ian Hubert

It's possible!! I think 2.83 is going to be more VR compatible (I've heard there are some plugins that already work)- I'm really excited to play around with it, but I don't know what system it works best with.

Lukas Sprehn

Ian, do you own any sort of VR headset and have you tried to use it with the Eevee models? Is it even doable? I get my Valve Index very soon :)

Mike L. Taylor

Rigged background cyberpunky people? Yes please!

Ian Hubert

I'll try to break down what I did at some point here, but honestly I still mostly get blobs, haha. I think it's mostly just taking a ton of photos with good lighting with no wind. The ferns didn't work particularly well, because they're not just big leaves, they're, y'know, fronds, with just a million little gaps between everything. Also lots (most) of the leaves in the render aren't connected to anything, they just kind of work from an impressionist standpoint, I think.

Ian Hubert

Technically it's like 1,500 photos all mushed together, hahaha- but yeah!! Actually, I learned the dynamic range thing from Ton. I did a shot for Tears of Steel, and he said, "That doesn't look very good, does it?" and I was like, "PSH it looks fine" and he was like, "Not really. Where are the highlights?" and I got all peeved and spent the next day going nuts trying everything I could to make it better, looking at a bunch of reference, and he was totally right. As soon as I re-worked the composition to allow a couple blown highlights and crunched blacks in there, it felt WAY more tangible.

Kennisoan

Dynamo: released 2012-2019, available on KarmaPirates youtube channel. Dynamo Dream: in production, not yet released.

gary hardesty

IAN !! Damn nice work you are sharing with all of us! Can't wait to try this today... Thanks for all you are sharing!

Kennisoan

DUDE!!! I literally was like "Well thats a nice photo". I guess that's partly because there's soooo many random stuff laying around that brain doesnt expect to be purposefully placed. And lack of dynamic range as well! Those all-white areas really make it look like a photo!

Robert Singler Jr

I've been using the 2.79 addon called "bake my scan" with the $125 Agisoft photogammetry modeler; I haven't messed with meshroom; but I've been getting a lot of great work out of Agisoft and that addon. Oddly Agisoft usually works better with fewer photos like around 18 is the sweetspot. Once I start pumping in over like 50 photos, it doesn't turn out so well.

Dewi

I can see a whole new art form developing, cg renders that imply the photographer was neck high in mud/water desperately trying not to drop their camera. Awesome as ever.

shonal bose

how come i cant see any blobs..all i see is art...

Nate

I really love this render, gives me zen outdoor feelies. Foliage usually ends up as blobs in my experience, it makes sense that the riverbed worked more - it helps me to think about photoscanning as if youve wrapped a bunch of that gift wrap plastic around what youre trying to scan and youve shrunk it with a hairdryer - the plastic is what your mesh will pretty much be. for some shapes that works super well, like a tree trunk or a rock, but for spiky complex thing things it doesnt usually work out so well.

Looks super nice Ian! Could you make a quick vid of the process of photogrametry? I'm not sure about how to do it. thx :)

Kryat Lore

Wait... Is Dynamo out yet? I don't wanna miss any of it! Also, those nature assets ROCK!

Gamba

yeahh!.. do you retoch and remodel part of the geometry? or you just use that you get from the photogrammetry ??? I never see good foliage made for this technical... only big leaves and with little amount ..

It looks awesome ! How did you scan foliage ?! last time I tried, I got a bunch of green blobs at the end... we need a tutorial :)

Chromfell

as a still shot that looks just about perfect. plants are way too damn noisy for the blob to be obvious. i'm sure in animation it might be a bit weirder.

yeees!! need more nature and wooden things pls !!

Ian Hubert

I do! Probably too much. I add some diffusion/grain kind of as a reflex originally as a hipster thing, then as a crutch to help the cg/live action gel, and now mostly just as a habit, haha

Ian Hubert

50?? That's a big project! Also, dude that's a wild Belgian law!! I'm sure that was kind of a pain but it also having to research that many flowers sounds really nice, haha And HUH- so- I have some scenes that I want to make just a TAD more fantastical in the future. It'd be cool to track the scenes and scatter some Belgian Flowers through it with a particle system. I might reach out when the time comes, if it's convenient for you!! Thanks, man!

Dimitar

Nice! looking forward. By the way to do add noise to your image post?

Jan van den Hemel

Oh yeah I've made like 50 indiginous Belgian plants and flowers, if you ever need them (Blend files with textures). I spent weeks making them for an Archviz project (Some crazy Belgian law: Architects are not allowed to use anything but local plant life for their designs, and of course turbosquid etc don't have any of them). If you ever need those... They're not great, but good enough from afar. I can't sell them because they use some commercial textures and random photos from Google.