Rocks

PawelBrzu · February 12, 2017, 2:04pm

Hello,
I’ve started experimenting with the photogrammetry. Photos were taken by phone. For this rock i take ~150 pictures So, here is the result.
Specification of the camera in my phone: 8mpx, 3264x2448 px.
Blender Cycles+Filmic+Gimp
1500 samples

Final render

Clay render with normal and bump map

I have a few more rocks at home. So I will try to scan also them.

tomiv87 · February 12, 2017, 5:18pm

I’m kinda newbie when it comes to photoscanning, but I’ve heard about it few times and it sounds interesting.

What software did you use to create the mesh from your photos, or is that something you can do in blender? How does the topology look?

PawelBrzu · February 17, 2017, 9:42am

@tomiv87 For reconstruction I used VisualSFM for creation a mesh I used MeshLab. Also in MeshLab you can automaticly make a texture for model and I did it for my first stone.
With the second rock I had a few problems.

I wanted to have full scan, so I took the photos from each site of the rock. To do it I had to rotate the stone manually, so when I placed the photos in VisualSFM I received a lot of artifacts(useless verticles). I removed them in MeshLab and create a polygonal mesh also in MeshLab. Next step was to clean the topology in Blender. I deleted unnecessary verts and I filled holes. In sculp mode I polished surfaces, which should be flat. Unfortunately texture generated by the MeshLab was wery bad (because I have bad quality photos, defocused etc.), so I paint the new texture in Blender by using the stencil paint mode.

tl;dr: 1. I used VisualSFM and MeshLab.
Some tutorials:

2. The topology after the reconstruction, in my case was bad. It’s requires some repairs, or retopology.
3. Its good to have a good quality photos, and avoid the shadows and reflections on the object when you take a pictures.
4. You can achieve better results when you make photos around of the static object.
Like I said before, I wanted to have 360 degree scan so, that’s why I was turning the stone.

Three renders of new stone.

fxg · February 20, 2017, 9:15am

Very nice!
How much verts has the final model?

PawelBrzu · February 24, 2017, 9:04am

@fxg Thanks! Final model has 45 596 faces, 34 048 verts. So a lot.
But it can be easily fixed. To reduce number of the verts can use a remesh modifier, and bake the textures from the high poly mesh to the low poly mesh. I was trying this method, but I had problems with the diffuce color texture, and I was too lazy to repaint it.

Render time is 1 minute 10 second on GTX 660 Ti in 720p.

Two new renders.