3D Scanners
polycounter lvl 13
With technology that can scan up to a human hair perfectly, is there any point in specializing in modelling as a career... if you have just started out?
I mean, I know that not everything can be scanned, like things that don't exist. But it can make modelling a lot of other things easier, right? and therefore, its an even lower paid job?
I dunno, I'm just thinking here, what's your opinions?
I mean, I know that not everything can be scanned, like things that don't exist. But it can make modelling a lot of other things easier, right? and therefore, its an even lower paid job?
I dunno, I'm just thinking here, what's your opinions?
Replies
You didn't see traditional artists go out of business or drop lower average pay when the photocopier was invented...
3d scanners are good references for likenesses though.
beat me to it.. this ^
if anything mocap created more jobs, because you now need people to interpret the data then apply it...
"dude, we gotta get the new Sims 3 expansion out asap, help me haul this HOTEL into the scanner"
"no point bro, Blizzard are borrowing it to scan female Worgen"
seriously, you answered your question partly in your original question. As well as what's been said about scanned meshes being difficult to work with, think how much of the art content in games is actually non existent in the real world. Even the stuff that has been modelled for realism will often have intentional differences or stylisation.
However; I am pretty sure that they can not pull off the stuff a 3d Artist can do.
For example. Try scanning the Zergling for a test run ^^
These 3D scanners will kill us all!! kILL US ALL!!!!
On that note, I can see it being a VERY useful tool one day.
Game development costs just exponentially increased from PS2 to PS3, and if this can be used in any way to expediate art creation, then we should definitely embrace it.
Even though , brwnbread compares cabbages with apples , he has a valid point.
Take painting and photography : painting revolutionised itself when photography became viable.
Take sculpture and 3d printing + scanning : ( and by sculpture i mean portaiture and the kind of sculpture you use for ornaments or busts , not the one in the arts galleries )
If 3d printing of scans will become a viable alternative to sculpture , it will be like digital photograpy and traditional film photography.
Digital photography became more of a hobbyist/snapshot activity while traditional remained mostly in the arts realm.
I mean i can see people making their own sculptures almost as easy as making a digital photo now. ( it might not happen , but i can see it happening :P )
Also on the topic of mocap, you have all probably seen the blue cats avatar review , thats ablut 95% mocap if i understant correctly. So, while animators will not die , they will reorient themselves to do animation that mocap cannot reproduce.
My 2 cents anyway.
Edit :
By no means do i deny that it might become an awesome tool , "to expedite art creation" as JacqueChoi put it.
I'm pretty sure I remember Daz talking about using 3d-scanning as a source for likenesses when he was working on the James Bond games at EA.
Obviously it still requires a huge amount of clean-up though, I guess in most cases you'd want to retopo then project the scanned data onto a "clean" sub-d mesh to get a displacement map or raw highpoly.
It's still just another small part of a much bigger pipeline though, 3D scanning by itself isn't really going to achieve anything IMHO.
Btw. I dont believe in growth of 3D scanners too much. Affordable 3D printers on the other hand ...
the point was the demand for a 3d artist might go down(so harder to get a job)... and the salary might go down...
so, like, if you have only just started learning to become a 3d artist, as I pretty much am, is there a point to quit while your ahead and learn something similar but different?
NOT THAT I AM SAYING all I care about is da moneh.
But reading all your posts, I am convinced that it shouldn't be too bad.
HEY maybe it will make the salary go up as you would only need artists that can do unrealistic stuff, etc, i dunno
another point is, technology advances. So by the time I'm a few years into industry, there might be affordable scanners which scan perfectly down to every atom, and software which can retopologize for you... AND unwrap and texture the thing lol...
Why you think that this kind of things would lower the salary offered to 3d artists is beyond me ...
source:
[ame]
however, there's also an artistic style to the GH series that scanning and mocap just cannot produce, so of course there are "traditional" artists (traditional here being relevent to the conversation) creating that style from reference material supplied by uber wtf tools.
obviously some things would be easier to just model, but some things wont...
for example, say, a bottle or gun or a human that is already made.(I dunno how big they are now, but im guessing they can get really big in the future...)
the scanner is set up, so u can do things one after the other, really quick. u scan in. it scans perfectly, retopologizes it perfectly, and textures it... perfectly.
it would take no time at all if it was all set up right.
and yeah, ok, it probably wont lower the salary, but the demand for 3d artists wouldnt be as big, right?
the real deal for me was the good texture output you get from a scan - so if you do a nice retopo-job, you get a detailed, photorealistic texture with it that fits like a glove on an organic looking hi-res mesh that has a lot of subtle detail you don'T see in most people's sculpts.
creating a likeness from some lined-up photos is a joke in comparison, takes ages and - unless the artist is downright amazing - will probably end up looking manufactured and inferior in some way.
at least for now the process has a number of pitfalls though and it isn't exactly driving people out of work, more like changing the realities of the job. it can give you way better, more consistent results in less time than if you did it the manual way but i found it tends to make the work dull/repetitive: there's not much need for face sculpts and handpainted textures when using 3d scans and you'll spend your time patching up and baking textures mainly.
still, if the production requires a realistic look at a high standard like so many games nowadays, you'd be outright stupid not to utilize a scanner.
edit: referring to scanning humans (actors) for characters here, not props nor furries (scanners don't capture hair well at all)
that is not true. Motion capture is a great starting point for previs, game animation, etc. But the data need to be integraded, so motion editors are needed. Drake fortune got 60% mocap and 40% keyframe layered on top as i remember. Mocap is fast and relative cheep compared to keyframe animation, but there are limits, i think there will always be keyframe animators. How do you want to mocap a dragon?
DUDE. He was being sarcastic. He's agreeing with you, there was no need to defend animators.
That would be awesome if that were even possible i think, then the artists don't need to focus on making the boring stuff anymore