Sorry I've been not posting for so long. I've been otherwise occupied. If Ruby on Rails were a gigantic sphincter... than my head would be lodged deep inside it. RoR is cool as heck baby. I love it.

By the way has this been posted here already somewhere?

http://www.david-laserscanner.com/

I am going to try this man. This looks wicked cool. All we need is for someone to do something similar for AM file export... although the obj import is pretty darn good these days.

-vern

Pretty neatO...let us know how that goes... here's an interesting paragraph in the manual:

Alternative to laser: Shadow line

Instead of using a laser, i.e. projecting a bright line onto the object, you can also project a dark line: Use a bright light source pointed towards the object, and move e.g. a cord between them, such that it projects a thin shadow line onto the object (without being directly visible in the camera image). To use this feature, you must select “Thin shadow line” under “Scanning Process” in DAVID's Scan dialog. It is important that the line is really straight and as sharp as possible. So you will need a point-shaped light source or parallel light, e.g. bundled by a lens.

lol.

Sorry.. but I've dealt with these "3d" models before. From multimillion dollar 3d scanners. Its not worth it Vern. Here's why.

1. You'll get a huge jumble of polygons, with no basic topology to them, ie.. not very good to animate with.
2. You'll have a ton of holes from the shadowed divots on the source. You'll have to fix those holes before you can do anything with the model.
3. You'll pretty much have to rebuild/create a new topology for the model anyway, in order to do anything with it. So why go through with scanning in the first place ;-)
4. AM only uses polys as props anyway, so unless you want to animate your splines around rough looking sandpaper balls with holes in them, you'd be better off modelling it in the first place.

my opinion based on cleaning this "crap" up before. take it with a grain of salt.

C

Thanks for the info on that one Colin.

I was just thinking... in the steps that are done there is one image that looks very much like a "depth map". I'm just wondering if this process couldn't be used to create displacement maps for AM models? this might be a cool way to "scan" in complex displacement maps from real world objects.

-vern

Not that I really know what I'm talking about, but isn't that how the big guys do it? I mean, I saw a "behind the scenes" on one of the Ice Age movies and they showed modelers making Sid and then scanning his head in, or something like that.

Are your comments A:M only, or 3D animation in general?

A model could be sculpted in clay and then scanned in, sure! But I'll bet'cha they use the scanned geometry as a 'base'(to trace or rotoscope) for their own modeling. As animators, when we make a model we are thinking ahead of the articulation the model will need to incur, whereas a scanner simply puts the mesh where it needs to describe the surface accurately.

Pretty much only AM related comments. Its still a huge pain to do in poly apps. I've worked with scans of Michealangelo's Pieta (with 40,000,000 polygons) as well as some Egyptian artifacts(10 to 20 million polygons). They were all problematic except for the super simple shapes.

Heads would be "Ok" since they don't have huge divots that would shade the topology. Still it seems silly when a good sculptor could just do it in zbrush or some other program and not have to clean it up. I guess maybe they are going for complete accuracy to the original maquette. speaking of zbrush, its great for taking these models and "re-modeling" them to something that makes sense and is usable. Still, for animation (which is what I'm assuming we are going for) this is a major pain in the butt compared to just modeling the object, especially if your program doesn't animate polys.

I suppose a possible work flow for this could be to scan the model then get some textured grid on it and place points to that grid, but still seems like more trouble than its worth.

Where this stuff comes in handy as in the work I did for the Vatican and Egypt is in art history and preservation. The scanner we used to scan the objects could scan down to the size of a pixel and simultaneously scan the texture of the surface as well. So you could get a virtually exact copy of the object at any given point in time with a scan. then come back years later and rescan to see the level of deterioration and re-evaluate your storage system.

I think this stuff is cool and may be useful one day, but for now I'm more interested in getting my stuff out to the real world than getting the real world into my box ;-)

Hope that clarifies my previous statements.

Good luck and let me know how the test goes.

C

One of the main things that fascinated me the most about this is how cheap it is. A laser pointer, a digital video camera and free software... as compared to thousands of dollars for a professional 3D scanner.

It is the "thinking outside the box" that really gets me excited. It falls into the same category is the guy who built a "milk scanner" using a lego's mindstorm contraption. I am going to try this with a displacement map. I just have to find out if that "image" can be extracted from the process. That is the fun about experimenting with things like this... it doesn't matter if there is an "easier" way to do it... the fun is the "Macgyver" aspect to it.

-vern

Fully agree, and I spend 30 minutes trying to get either of my USB webcam drivers to load.. no go. . It sucks wasting time with hardware that is so old the drivers currently available no longer support it.. :/ the USB hardware IDs don't even match what the current available drivers are looking for. But, if I can get them working.. I will be playing with this (not for animation, but for other uses).

The truth is, that scanning allways ends up with all the polygons in the wrong places, and not where you really need it, after all that was my personal experience which i made with an Roland MDX 15. which also is able to scan objects.
Regarding the amount of polygons which you end up with: Currently "refine topology" or short retopo is a buzzworld in the the polygonworld, and as far as i can see, it will help to solve some of the problems with scanned 3d data.
Regards
Heiner