Thanks Segaholic,
Interesting hearing your thoughts on scanning. Ok well here is my informative lecture on scanning. Ha. Just for the sake of information as I’ve given many presentations on the subject.
I def. disagree that scanning is generic. We use scanning in games and feature film for the exact reason that it is not generic. If we want a model to look exactly like a 3d sculpt (how pixar does it) or we want it to look exactly like an actor or even a city street then we scan it. Even when doing things like full New York city streets we lidar scan it. (Day after Tomorrow)
As for costs its much cheaper to scan. It’s about 3x cheaper actually. Not to mention much more accurate. I’ve spent lots of time doing cost evaluations for companies and comparing it it over the years. It’s cheaper by far. I’m not sure what scanning your familiar with or how its used in your pipeline. You definitely should not be getting raw scan data and “fixing” it. For me, I can pay Real Scan (LA based company) 3k or so to give me a 3d scan of an actor, retopo’d with 8k textures and complete in 1 week. No rebuild or retopo or texture work is required for me or my artists. Compare this to maybe a month to do the same thing by hand. Blur studios guys get about 1 month for a character if i’m not mistaken.
If you’re using any current scanning techniques then the photo is taken at the same moment the scan is happening so the 8k textures are mapped at the same time it’s being scanned. So there is no texture work involved at all. Plus then you get diffuse,bump,spec all in one shot. This includes Also you dont re-surface so there is no rebuild time. I only receive a photo-real finished product that matches the actor or object.
A really good character artist at 50-80dollars an hour to build a character from scratch and given 1 month to do it is 12,800. (at 80 per hour) Not to mention you just spent a month of production to only receive 1 character. Now imagine you’re doing 45 characters. There isn’t enough production time or artist availability to do this. Not to mention it would cost an incredible amount of money. Grand theft auto scanned over 700 people to get the texture data. Crazy! Other things like Avatar and so on. Even though you see scott’s beautiful sculpts of the Navi all over the internet, this was just for concept. They actually scanned the actors (ict scanning) so they’d be accurate and then added the Navi ears and adjusted the head shape etc… the face was ict scanned.
ICT scanning is quite a lot different. (Debevic’s system) I’ve spent a lot of time using this one actually. It’s really expensive and also really remarkable. It’s actually capturing animated scan data, animated diffuse, animated spec and so on. I’ve actually been scanned in this process personally. It’s INSANE. Very expensive but incredible technology.
As for NON human looking humans. (Gears of War) and so on. Its a similar approach. You model 1 or 2 then kit bash the rest. You don’t actually start from Nothing 20 times in a row of course. I love this type of style. I only dont do it personally because Its everywhere. Its like doing a hellboy sculpt or hulk. There are 100 posts a day on it. I was being a bit funny and exadgerating in my original post.
Ok thats my scan data post. Hope it was helpful.
Link me to your character you did I’d like to see.
