3D Scanning Technology shows it's potential

Blond

The future is coming along great boys.

https://img-9gag-fun.9cache.com/photo/a47vMep_460svvp9.webm

There was also this video feature that was shown months ago about actually scanning live action MOIVING scenes into a complete 3D scenes.

I really wonder how far and fast this will develop in the next couple of years.

Eric Chadwick

The video doesn't show anything remotely new, it shows someone playing with scans in AR, after all the tedious scanning & processing work was done. Looks to me like a proof-of-concept promo for an AR interface idea.

fmnoor

I guess the big proof of concept in this video is sharing assets via instant message - which is kind of an interesting idea

JordanN

What's stopping someone from standing outside and scanning people?

Imagine you go online and you find someone has a 3D model of you. 

Or imagine standing outside of Hollywood and scanning celebrities. Free Bruce Willis model!

Eric Chadwick

Read up on copyright law for photographers, same basic ideas apply.
https://blog.kenkaminesky.com/photography-copyright-and-the-law/

SnowInChina

JordanN said:

What's stopping someone from standing outside and scanning people?

mostly the law and second the fines you would have to pay for breaking it

also, scanning people is not that easy, at least if you want to get a good scan

making 2-3 snapshots while running around will not get you the results you are after

sprunghunt

JordanN said:

What's stopping someone from standing outside and scanning people?

Imagine you go online and you find someone has a 3D model of you. 

Or imagine standing outside of Hollywood and scanning celebrities. Free Bruce Willis model!

California in particular has a law that would prevent you from getting scans of celebrities without their permission.

 http://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/california-right-publicity-law

Unknown_Target

No, TBH I think the really amazing thing about this isn't the scans - it's placing objects in space using what looks like a regular cell phone camera. It's really hard to get depth sensing without a dedicated scanner. Who made this?

Eric Chadwick

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YizMalWigkI

Oops, I was totally wrong. This is something new. Decent hand-held scanning on mobile! 

I'm amazed by the metallic bird, see how the blue and pink papers are reflected dynamically on its belly as it moves. Are they creating light probes from the environment?



I think most of the reflections are simply baked into the diffuse, the highlights on its back, etc. And it's probably not generating a normal map, nor proper roughness/specularity. But still pretty neat.

Blond

Wow! Impressive! Just wait 5 years and the average poeple will be able to make some crazy videos with today's VFX level of precision with their smartphone lol...

SnowInChina

didnt google work on a phone with 2 cameras exactly for this purpose

for scanning things in realtime

Eric Chadwick

We've been playing around with the new ARKit, which this app uses too. It builds lighting probes from the back camera, and interpolates detail for the upper part of the view (what can't be seen by the back camera). Neat stuff.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/arkit/adding_realistic_reflections_to_an_ar_experience

melviso

Hmmm.. I think this new tech is great but how would modelers cope with this competition?

Eric Chadwick

It's not competition. Remember the fuss with motion capture stealing all the work away from animators? Didn't happen. Just like mocap only captures realistic motion, this only captures shapes of real-world objects, and not really all that well. The textures are just color maps, too.

poopipe

If anything the spread of this sort of tech will open up opportunities for graduates just like the use of mocap did.  After all, somebody has to clean it up  

melviso

I most definitely see this as good especially for archviz. I was just wondering about modelers for games/films. Most times, in archviz, the modeling, texturing, lighting and rendering is done by one person.

Shrike

Thats just a total scam from what I can tell

The bread is not even the same. The frontal bread structure is totally different and the crust too, no way that is projected.
Im sure they modelled / scanned the things per hand and then composited it all in a video. The bird has clearly different base lighting and is way too defined. Clearly you are amazed because its total fake. 

Also no way you are getting higher resolution textures on your scanned model than your mobile camera can even display, thats ridiculous.




Im recording a blurry mess and then my texture projection is suddenly sharper and looks totally different? Yeah sure. 



Thats not even close to texture projected, thats clearly not the same. Modeled per hand and projected in after effects. Probably trying to get funding with a composited demo. Or they have state of the art neural network aided mesh and texture interpretation, which I would heavily doubt

pior

Totally agreed. It is very carefully made to look as if the footage has been live-captured casually, but it doesn't pass the smell test.

Which is a shame, because technology-wise we're really not very far from that - Qlone on Android is pretty damn neat, and even though it requires a printed grid for calibration and a slow pan around the object, I could totally see it being optimized further especially with phones with multiple cameras.

But yeah regardless, this video is just BS hype material at this stage (or just part of a media package to raise funding). I am constantly amazed by how easily people fall for that kind of stuff as soon as some shaky cam and relatively clean compositing is thrown in. This reminds me of the initial Pokemon Go trailers - even though it was obvious that what was shown was an artistic/ideation trailer, some folks still wanted to believe that this would be what the game would look like

(Also, the wireframe having varying thickness is a dead giveaway too. There's no reason for it to look like that ... except if it was done as a post processing effect of course ... just like here : 
http://www.mustaphafersaoui.fr/quick-tip-01-c4d-wireframe-render-generator/ )

(BTW : "Its", not "it's" )

sacboi

pior said:

Qlone on Android is pretty damn neat, and even though it requires a printed grid for calibration and a slow pan around the object, I could totally see it being optimized further especially with phones with multiple cameras.

Geez!...now that is indeed very neat, although pity AFAIK the app currently is IOS centric whereas with Android it's still not fully featured?

https://3dscanexpert.com/qlone-smartphone-3d-scanning-app-ios-android-review/

Anyway regardless as a 3D Scan/photogrammetry noob, IMO looks to be a low cost entry into getting my mitts on a piece of this not so new/new fangled tech.  

Eric Chadwick

Shrike said:

The bread is not even the same. 

Look closer, the pores are the same. Just a different resolution, and lighting filtered. During the scan you move around the object, getting close and far, and the software blends those details together, removing some of the lighting.

It's not all that far-fetched, we've actually tried it out here. TBH though it's no end-game tech, cell phone lenses suck, and the point cloud is pretty low-res. But it's still a great proof of concept.

Blond

UPDATE: IT'S ALL REAL or close to be...

Somebody at my work fascinated everybody showing off the new IKEA application with his smartphone. The guy was able to seamlessly place, rotate and scale furniture around the room! The angle, placement and position of the scanned (?) asset was consistent throughout the whole thing... 

oglu

Ikea assets are modeled by hand. They do crazy things to get this detailed furniture. 

Eric Chadwick

Yeah, not the same as the video you posted, which is about scanning.

Apple's ARKit gives you the scaling/moving/lighting tech already all figured out. So developers like IKEA/Wayfair can just plugin their models, and it just *works*. Google has similar tech in their ARCore toolkit for Android.

The scanning thing though is new.