Messages

1

General / Close holes... useless?

« on: April 06, 2015, 08:00:43 AM »

Id like to use the close holes function so that I may project the texture on that area but lets be honest here, am I missing something or is the command essentially useless? The polys is uses to fill are... gross, like a huge mess that usually requires more cleanup than should be required. Maybe the pro version at least has some kind of subdivision instead of laying down 400 foot long, micro-thin overlapping polygons all over everything?

 This and a few other lack of essential features have me at a loss, which is sad because Ive been behind this piece of software for a few years but my zero-budget doesnt allow me to plunk down thousands for the pro version, especially since its missing key features (That Autodesk will no doubt soon implement)

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General / Re: Workflow - Photoscan to game asset

« on: April 24, 2014, 05:53:15 AM »

My old work paid to have this kind of scan done externally and weren't interested in buying 25k worth of gear to do it in-house.

Man, what I wouldn't give to have $25k for a highend rig, to be honest our little rig at my work (10 camera) cost us around $1500 to build. I think that is one of the misconceptions of photogrammetry as well, you only need the fidelity that will support your end goal. If it is film/tv/fullbody then yes, you'd want a rig like big guys on the forum, but for the quality we were aiming for our little inexpensive system worked just fine.

Well this was a massive game company that had already spent 20million and full production hadn't even begun yet so... What should have been a drop in the bucket turned out to be too much of a commitment but really, it was probably equal to their yearly sandwich budget for their fancy leads meetings...

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General / Re: Workflow - Photoscan to game asset

« on: April 24, 2014, 12:49:10 AM »

Having said that, I can certainly appreciate good tools that get me as far as possible with as little hassle as possible, but since functionality like smoothing out noisy mesh, building retopo or adaptive decimation already exists in other programs, I encourage Agisoft to keep improving speed and quality of photogrammetry-related algorithms first, and only when that is as good as it gets, to focus on further steps of asset pipeline. Actually increased precision, lower noise of reconstructions and better texture blending (that would pick sharpest photos for texture generation) would go a long way towards speeding up further steps in the pipeline.

Agree on all those counts, this just feels like Im back in 1996 trying to edit quake levels with no documentation or tools. Does any recommend a tutorial for the process? is there any 1 stop tools? 3D coat seems interesting..

And yes Emulated, I believe they gave up too quickly as well. In terms of face scanning its a given and PS almost loved this kind of work, because its already an expensive and important process, money has been spent on this. My old work paid to have this kind of scan done externally and weren't interested in buying 25k worth of gear to do it in-house. But there is no doubt facial scanning is being used worldwide but I think a few of us are approaching scanning from an environment perspective, which is slower to gain traction...

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General / Re: Workflow - Photoscan to game asset

« on: April 23, 2014, 10:55:33 PM »

I realize Autodesk wont be spitting out game ready assets. Yet. I believe that is their intention (From speaking to someone there), they bought a company that was doing a similar photogrammetry applications but for industrial use, it was very expensive but that is their processing backbone, cloud-based.

For me the issue was convincing a studio that was satisfied with using outsourcing and local artists to create assets, the problem with the PS output is that it requires a very skilled artist to turn it into game ready assets. Those types of artists are in high demand and well paid, so trading a junior artists applying tiling textures to a deformed cube is much more attractive than scanning the objects, half a day compiling time (and who knows what else to export a mesh) then getting a guy who should be doing character faces to process a rock for a few days...

I still think some studios are going to see the benefit or have a game that requires such assets but for now Im concentrating on the VFX/CG field, I believe they are more ready to deal with this type of data and have realism requirements that far outweigh the game industry, which is still locked into highly optimized content.

I wasn't really blaming PS for this, although I will point out that making ANY of the issues better doesn't seem too high on their priorities list.. Ive seen research papers posted on here on noise reduction and more intelligent detail-retention (for lower poly output) go relatively ignored so Im not sure if there are any plans for this. I believe features like this would help sell many many more copies of PS, which I think could be good?

The tutorials section of agisoft.ru should have refined workflow suggestions to get people in the right direction, sifting through forums or youtube for (potentially) incorrect methods isnt really doing much for the cause.

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General / Re: Workflow - Photoscan to game asset

« on: April 23, 2014, 07:59:04 PM »

... sometimes you need to re-sculpt broken areas, sometimes.... the list goes on

I guess the question is: does it need to go on? Im telling you right now, Autodesk's mission is to overtake and crush Agisoft in this area. They will attempt to streamline this process into something that isn't daunting to game studios.

Ok  story time: At my former studios (and this was a giant studio that should have all the skills and smarts to figure this out), only character artists seemed to be comfortable with the post-processing of these assets, in fact it was only theoretical because they were too busy to be tasked with even trying it, but they seemed confident they could. Meanwhile the environment artists were not experts in high-poly workflow, they are used to dealing with blocky worlds, not sculpting multi-million polygon meshes and the workflow to bake and optimize everything down to game ready assets.

So in the end when one of the them tried a simple asset, it too 80% of the time it would have if it was done from scratch and it looked like SH*T. Next we tried to get outsourcing to process the assets but first we got an estimate on how long it would take to make the asset from scratch (we sent them a photo of the object). They said 10 days from scratch, so then we sent them the 5 million polygon asset, which looked gorgeous and asked "OK now how long?". They said 8 days, this was a suspicious disappointment to me, but the worst part is yet to come... in the end it took 10 f-ing days and once again, the asset looked like SH*T.

I was assured that outsourcing would never see scanning as a threat to their precious cash flow and they would never purposely take longer in order to lead us away from scanning, I didn't believe it for a moment. Sadly I had gambled my employment on this stuff and soon I was out the door.

So that's a story from the real world, while its possible to make game ready assets from PS outputs, its currently daunting and time-consuming, does it need to be? Does its difficulty keep the process exclusive enough so we dont get waves of interns getting tasked with scanning the world while talented artists and photographers cue up for unemployment? I believe scanning will actually bring home jobs from China because currently, most major studios are offloading their art assets to Asia, so I dont see we have much to lose.

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General / Re: Workflow - Photoscan to game asset

« on: April 23, 2014, 06:59:50 AM »

Honestly I just got laid off from a large game studio that failed to see the potential in photogrammetry, simply because of the garbage PS outputs. Sorry to be blunt but the UV layout is horrible, tris instead of nice quad meshes, PS picks weird surfaces to project with so you end up with blurry patches unless you do reprojections in other packages or similar workarounds. I have mentioned this to Agisoft but was just told 'thats the way it is'.

I feel they are leaving the door wide open for someone (Like Autodesk) to come along with better output and just take over game and CG/VFX assets. That being said there are several threads with people talking about their processes and they are heavily involved, using high-end sculpting tools and techniques, currently there are no shortcuts. Maybe someone will have more information than me but hearing "My photography and graphics design skill set is much better than my 3D" is disheartening because that's where Im at and judging by my currently employments status, its not the best place to be...

Here is a breakdown of how a game studio uses the assets http://imgur.com/a/wq8JK
Zbrush tutorial using 123dcatch output of a rock https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMkWDDmO5A8

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General / Scanning building interiors

« on: April 16, 2014, 11:17:41 PM »

I have done some limited testing with this but wanted to see how people's experiences have been this this? Post-process or HDR? Piece by piece or one giant scan? Artificial lights? Types of passes through the room vs winder-angle lens vs sharpness?

Thanks!

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General / Ideal workflow with masks?

« on: April 11, 2014, 05:38:34 PM »

I'm doing some outdoor work and lately Ive been doing masks BEFORE camera alignment, assuming its wasting points on backgrounds objects, is this the right thinking or only when building a dense cloud?
Here is my workflow:

Shoot, mask out blurry, unusable areas THEN align photo, build dense cloud, build mesh, build textures

is this right? Or does the dense cloud build do everything over again anyways so might as well not mask things out, letting them be used for camera alignment/placement, then once they are placed, masking things becomes useful?

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Feature Requests / Re: Masking - Simple Right Click Mouse Menu

« on: March 21, 2014, 08:15:49 AM »

+1

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Face and Body Scanning / Re: Syncing flashes turntable setup

« on: March 14, 2014, 05:41:47 AM »

The modelling light compared to the flashes is insignificant , or was anyways with the setup I had, like having a candle in the sunshine

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General / Re: Artifacts/sparklies in mesh (3dmax)

« on: March 14, 2014, 05:40:08 AM »

I have used a polarized workflow in a related field and you need polarized light ONLY and a filter on the camera, and everything setup properly for it to work. The filter on the camera takes out some reflections and spec but the only way to get NO SPEC is to to put polarizing gel over the flash units and not have any other light present. I have no tried this for 3d scanning yet but will next week, I anticipate other problems popping up (As in high spec objects will be almost jet black, like when I used this workflow on handguns, the metal was almost jetblack, as the majority of the objects diffuse is spec-based...)

12

General / Re: How deal with buildings an trees

« on: March 09, 2014, 12:28:15 AM »

Admir: Yeah I just assumed if you used many cameras to do some side of the building, that alone could add up to so many cameras that if you tried to do the whole building with that kind of detail, it would be 100's of photos and PS would die (its died on me when i push it too hard)

I guess if he used sparse coverage like I said, it might be ok

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General / Re: Artifacts/sparklies in mesh (3dmax)

« on: March 09, 2014, 12:26:44 AM »

When i generate texture, i tend to use certain angles to minimize depth of field blur, I wish there was more finer control like generate what you can with 3-4 cameras that cover 80% of the object properly, then lock those in and use additional cameras to fill in the black holes left over. I realize people can do this in mudbox but from my experience, the UV stuff and the lack of proper topology coming out of PS was a major hurdle in trying to get this more accepted in my field (game production). The pipeline scared people off

Now im laid off and going on my own..

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General / Re: Artifacts/sparklies in mesh (3dmax)

« on: March 08, 2014, 10:05:46 AM »

Yeah.. I was never well versed in UV mapping, especially on a complex object, Ill have to figure it out!
So no matter what cameras you choose to use to generate texture, itll follow the UV layout specific in the re-imported mesh?

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General / Re: How deal with buildings an trees

« on: March 07, 2014, 11:09:04 PM »

its funny, I view the world in how easy it would be to scan it or hard in this case.. Taking closeup photos I agreed with but the quality may not be the best unless you do it section by section and connect the chucks together. Otherwise try sparse, closer coverage. If the trees were further back you could try taking more photos but masking out trees in each section but these branches are too small and numerous..