I do a lot of underwater work (https://deep3d.co.uk) but I must confess the idea of a surface hasn't really been something to consider - for me at least - even when working with coral data.
Are you including a scale bar or anything in the scene that can act as an indicator of scale?
This may be something more suitable in the VR/game engine world perhaps?
Unless I'm missing something?
I've been following your work for years. It's been a big inspiration to me to get scanning down here!
What we're missing most, is the ability to put the underwater scans into context... That it's actually underwater... And for scuba diving, we need to know the depth.
If you take your Acorn (
https://skfb.ly/opFZ7) and Stalwart (
https://skfb.ly/MGK6) models, to a layperson, they're basically the same, but one is a bit green...
I know the Stalwart is underwater, as I've swam around it at ADAC! But the model doesn't tell you where it is in relation to the surface.
And for your other wrecks, some of them are shallow, some of them are deep, but we cannot know how deep from the models.
For my dive site scans, we want to use them for dive site briefings, and especially at 'Manta Point', where we hang out with all the mantas for an hour, the focal feature of the site is the big bungalow sized cleaning station rock near the cliffs, it's where the mantas congregate/concentrate... This rock is only 4m deep on the top, 11-12m deep around it. So any 'map', model of it absolutely has to have the surface represented somehow.
The manta point model just doesn't work well enough as a map without that surface being there.
RE: Scale bars...
It's was easy for me to find two notable rocks that were 10m apart and to get their relative bearing, and also the depths of some of the big rocks, so using MS's grid, i've set the model 'depth', scale and orientation to an accuracy that's easily good enough (plus we have a 2.5m tidal range of course).
Adding a scale bar to the 2D captures I'll make to print off with be easy to do, along with a compass of course... But I'll mostly be photoshopping in divers and mantas that i've accidentally scanned, or that i'll photograph in place specifically for scale bars.
I've attached a couple of captures from my Blue Corner dive site scan. The first jus shows some rocks... The second, with my mate Jason in it, taken from one of the scan's images, photoshopped in, totally gives you a feeling of how big those rocks are.. (Sadly there have been no Molas there yet during my scans)... So this gives us scale, but no context of the depth.
For 3D models, fly-thu videos, the best scale bars will be if i can add 3D models of mantas, and divers to it. That's obviously a job for Blender, and a tough one for me. But again, if i had a representation of the water's surface, then that already adds most of the context to the 3D model, video fly-thrus of it.
Turning on the grid makes a huge difference, but it's a grid. It just gets in the way a bit. No matter what transparency you set.
When doing aerial surveys of a building, town, terrain, we can infer the scale of it just from the familiar features present, and we know that we could walk around on the ground show, as we're stuck in the '2d' world... We simply don't care what the altitude is of that site, it's not important... But underwater, sometimes it's just rocks, coral, so we need to be given something to scale off of, but we mostly need to know how far underwater it is, especially if it's not that deep.
Almost everything we scan underwater needs to have depth cues, context to the surface we're below.