3D Scanning and its impact on the games industry

deohboeh

As 3D scanning is becoming a big thing in games and many studios prefer it, where does that put the artist? What all skills do you need to know? Would these studios need artists? Do you as an animator need to know mo-cap?

I know most games will still be using sculpted or painted art but my question is regarding realistic games like the stuff quantic dreams, farm 51, remedy and other such studios.

ExcessiveZero

I honestly don't think scanning is as big a thing as you are trying to make it out to be.

Scanning is awesome though as the scanners get better, we got mocap too but damn ive seen some shitty mocaps before and mocaps in general can be such a nightmare to clean up it will take a good animator longer to clean up a mocaps frames than to make a decent smooth animation himself, pixar for instance never uses mocap (as far as im aware at least) as for scanning actual objects, it can work and I think it can be great for things like faces I think they do it in call of duty,but really thats going to just be the begining, no way is the hair going to be the best it can be, nor the textures topology etc but who is going to be able to scan a troll, a spaceship, or even something like a tree, a scanner doesn't have a brain, it can't scan concept art as far as i've seen so I don't really see any point in worrying about it .

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lr1XDzBR2Ys"]A Scanner Darkly - YouTube[/ame]

EmAr

Kojima Productions is using it in a way which enables real-world make up artits to create game art. A real person gets molded and a clay model is produced, a make up artist modifies the face, builds scars/wounds etc. on the clay model, then the result gets scanned.

So, I guess the demand for real world sculpting skills may increase. It would be easier to talk about it if we knew how much it decreases the overall production time of a character. Any insight about that would be great.

Skip to 27:30 if you haven't seen the presentation I mentioned:

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQMbxzTUuSg"]Hideo Kojima GDC 2013 Panel - MGS5 & Fox Engine - YouTube[/ame]

DerekLeBrun

If you can sculpt in zbrush then you can already work on scan data. Imagine if another artist sculpted a head and handed it off to you to finish, but it's missing pieces of the ears, covered in noisy bumps and blobs, and the hair is completely unusable. You then go through the process of cleaning/re-sculpting/smoothing all of it, and finally adding in all your tertiary detail that the scanners can't capture.

In order to get better data with less artifacts and noise you need a massive tripod mounted camera rig with an automatic triggering system. Kojima's setup looks to have about 140 DSLR cameras which would run a company $120,000+.

Here's an example of REALLY good scan data, but I suspect most of it has already been cleaned up: http://www.3dscanstore.com/