Scientists work out way to capture 3d texture info in a flash

cman2k

An incredibly simple method, and suprisingly nice results.

http://gizmodo.com/5042393/scientists-work-out-way-to-capture-3d-texture-info-in-a-flash

Now how long until this feature is integrated into Crazybump? eh? EH?

Cody

Not only is that girl's accent hot, she is talking about geometry and textures! *whistles*

Haha, but this tech is pretty awesome. It seems geared more towards cinematics/movies/tv then games, so I think our jobs are safe.

JasonLavoie

That's actually really cool, and really simple... nice find cman

Tumerboy

Cody, how is this not for games!? I saw that and immediately thought of how awesome it would be to get a basic start to texturing. It's not like it replaces us, just makes our lives easier.

Cody

True. Sorry, I am in a hand painted texture world at the moment, and was like, that wouldn't work for me....DUHR.

Mark Dygert

Cody wrote: »

Not only is that girl's accent hot, she is talking about geometry and textures! *whistles*

Haha, but this tech is pretty awesome. It seems geared more towards cinematics/movies/tv then games, so I think our jobs are safe.

I'd like to know how the plan on photographing things that don't exist or they don't have access to =P

Eric Chadwick

Ryan already has a tutorial that does a similar thing.
http://www.zarria.net/nrmphoto/nrmphoto.html

Does require more control over the lighting, though you could simply do it at night.

cman2k

Yeah, this is essentially a more advanced method that needs less setup.

The big advantage I would see here is that I could be anywhere and use my camera to take the two necessary photos, with no extra setup. And the generated heightmap would be very accurate with little to no extra work on my part. Awesome.

hawken

you're all out of the job

Mezz

Looks really cool :P

And I may be crazy and too tired, but the lady was talking about how it'd be problematic to have things like vines on the rock becuase the geometry wouldn't be able to be seperated. But did they not show an example that had lots of scattered leaves on the rocks? Or were those not part of the example? Or added after? Or...??

Tumerboy

nah, leaves on rocks were ok because the WHOLE texture was 1 ground texture. Ivy over a wall would likely (normally) be two objects/texture sets. If you just wanted to make 1 texture of a wall with ivy on it, you could still use this technique. They were just pointing out that if you wanted Ivy, and you wanted a Wall, you wouldn't be able to take a picture of a wall covered in Ivy and expect it to extrapolate the two separate textures.

Kawe

Vig wrote: »

I'd like to know how the plan on photographing things that don't exist or they don't have access to =P

first you model it out as a hipoly. then you make a hugeass 3d print of it... then take some photos.. oh yeah.. instant win.