Faces, costumes, and locations… Remnant’s 3D scanning blitz has come to
an end. After shooting lasers at all objects imaginable, Remnant
recuperates and preps for the next push in their vendor showcase
project.
 It
started with a Wednesday evening laser scanning session that ran several
hours, one face after another of freshly shaved men and women of all
sorts. Director Daniel Morrison comments that, “Getting talent to shave
was the hardest part.” The men needed to be clean shaven because hair
doesn’t return good data when you use the laser line probe for 3D
scanning faces. But one can hardly complain when they used the FARO
scanner to capture seventeen unique, high-resolution, 3D, facial models
in three hours. Hand modeling can’t touch that rate; but modeling faces
was just the start.
Meeting with FARO rep. Paul Oberle, Daniel’s small team made their way
to a unique residence tucked away in San Jose’s east foothills for their
location capture. The approach is straight forward: aim high resolution
scanning coverage over all angles of the selected location. It does take
a bit of planning, and a little light footedness since displacing any of
the furniture adds to the post processing work when stitching the scans
together later. The time length of each scan directly affects the level
of detail obtained. Also affecting the overall level of detail is the
amount of scans that are used to create the final 3D model. Daniel’s
team spent a few hours capturing eight, six minute scans, covering the
entire room in HDR photos, and snapping off a few image probe shots as
well. This approach to modeling a location will provide real world
levels of detail, while managing real world limits on resources. Since
Remnant’s team currently doesn’t have the man power to model these
locations from scratch (and needs to have a final product around the
beginning of next year), this streamlined approach is just what is
needed. But they’re not content to reserve scanning to mere faces and
locations, when there is a wider world out there. |
In a workshop of welders, sand paper, and leather tools movie magic is
designed, cut, smelt, bent, and sewn together. Renegade Effects is an
amazing miniature, practical, costume, and prop shop; they are the one
stop on everything tangible for effects and Remnant teamed up with them
on the fifteenth to snag some period costumes. But Remnant’s approach to
“snagging” a few costumes included breaking out the 3D scanner with Paul
Oberle and scanning the costumes for animation purposes. The approach is
meant to continue streamlining the CG project, and still maintain
exceptional levels of detail. These techniques are speeding up the
Vendor Showcase Project, but 3D scan clean up can be a mire if you don’t
have some smart tools.
InnovMetric’s Polyworks is Remnant’s bridge to get point cloud data
converted into a clean 3D mesh for animation. Point cloud data can
return wildly placed points or fuzzy data depending upon the
reflectivity and absorption of the surfaces you’re scanning. Black
surfaces return less light, and a flat black surface can show up like a
wave in a point cloud.
 Polyworks filtering is the first step to exclude
wild data points. But then there are also holes in the data, drop outs
(where the laser never returned to the scanner), or occlusions in the
stitches where you haven’t obtained enough angles to reach all the way
around the objects you’re scanning. Polyworks’ hole filling and mesh
rebuilding tools are the workhorses on Remnant’s scans. But they are
only a few of the many tools Polyworks offers for mesh restoration.
Remnant’s director states, “I was blown away with the tools. They made
my job so much easier.” He continued, “I don’t know how I would do this
without them.”
All these customized meshes will become characters, sets, costumes, and
props in what promises to be a truly unique and riveting short CG
production. But they’re lifeless objects for now, and will have to await
their union with motion capture data before they can take on their final
form. Remnant is already practicing with tactical instructor Beau Bunac
for next month’s motion capture fight performances. Get ready to see
what creatively managed automated processes can do for a production. |
