Page 1 of 2

Received Nextengine scanner yesterday

Posted: Tue Aug 15, 2006 5:22 pm
by b-kandor
So far looks pretty good!

I did a scan of a small figurine last night - I'm no expert yet at post processing, so there are some small voids etc.

I did a 360 scan divided into 16 scans, so after each scan the turntable rotates 22.5 degrees and scans again.

I saved the result to an obj files which opened fine in maxwell although it seems the scale was off.

I also opened the obj in modo and it comes with the textures applied (as you may know the nextengine scanner photographs the object while scanning and indexes those jpg's to the scan data)

So in Modo I can actually just hit render and see the object as it looks in real life.

I wonder if there is a way to translate the texture mapped obj in modo into maxwell?

Kandor

Posted: Tue Aug 15, 2006 5:46 pm
by Eric Lagman
Sweet :D Keep us posted on how easy it is. Did you upgrade to SW office premium, or are you just going to stay with using the meshes at this point? You will have to post some pics so we can see.

Posted: Tue Aug 15, 2006 6:09 pm
by b-kandor
No I havn't upgraded yet, I'm going to wait until I feel comfortable with using the scanner. Also it's early days for both sw2007 and nextengine, I expect bugs and patches to be frequent so it seems prudent in my case to wait for the dust to settle. Ultimately, as soom as I'm on a project that 'requires' the scanner tools then I'll pull the trigger (metaphorically speaking of course :) )

I just did this quickly with no prep, held my hand still for 2 minutes, did a single pass, no processing at all, opened in modo and clicked render.
(ps. why do png images show completely different tones on the web?)

Image

Posted: Tue Aug 15, 2006 9:06 pm
by Leonardo
:D more pics please!!

Posted: Tue Aug 15, 2006 10:06 pm
by Mihai
Great! Please keep us updated. The colors of that scan looks like something from Dawn of the Dead :P

Why so many holes in the model, is it because of the surfaces being too reflective?

Posted: Tue Aug 15, 2006 10:59 pm
by b-kandor
The scan is one pass only, holes are missed returns which in this case are due to the glancing angles. Reflective or transparent surfaces need treatment as well with talcum powder or posterpaint etc. I'm still figuring things out and havn't got into post processing yet. A magics rp type program would be good for this. That render looks pretty bad but I wanted to show how the scanner perfectly maps the image capture onto the scan data, it's really something!

Posted: Tue Aug 15, 2006 11:32 pm
by Mihai
Could you post a screenshot from modo of what the uv's look like? It's per face?

Posted: Wed Aug 16, 2006 12:30 am
by b-kandor
If you tell me how to do that, I'd be delighted! :D

If I look under uv edit, it's empty?

Posted: Wed Aug 16, 2006 1:09 am
by Mihai
I have no idea :) The uv's need to be somewhere if you can render with a map. What does the image map look like?

Posted: Wed Aug 16, 2006 1:18 am
by b-kandor
Here is the image, it appears to have a mask layed on it that corresponds to the scan area.....

edit <removed large picture>

Posted: Wed Aug 16, 2006 1:25 am
by Mihai
Thanks for the image, neat that they don't brake up the texture. You think this scanner could work for scanning faces? I wouldn't need accuracy 100% just to get a reasonably good volume and then model over that with polys.

Posted: Wed Aug 16, 2006 1:29 am
by b-kandor
Mihai,

Nextengine says:

each pixel in the sensor that we capture an x,y,z point for has a u,v mapped into our texture map
since it is the same sensor, there is no error in the mapping
we keep around the full-resolution image regardless of how decimated the 3D data is and then each 3D point has a map into the texture

Posted: Thu Aug 17, 2006 5:15 am
by b-kandor
I scanned my face yesterday as a test, worked pretty well - kind of spooky. When I can find a volunteer I'll do a 3 pass bracket of a face and try to post it. I asked my wife and she looked me straight in the eye and said 'I will never let you scan my face." :D

In the meantime I did a test with my antique bobber:

ps. I keep bringing the obj's into modo because modo is nice enough to load all the texture maps (there is one jpeg per scan pass ie. 8 for the bobber) I imagine that maxwell will not be able to load these obj textures due to the material system? Is there a way around that? Still dropouts on the tip there but I was pretty pleased with the accuracy.

Image

Posted: Thu Aug 17, 2006 8:28 am
by SunlightRocker
b-kandor wrote:I asked my wife and she looked me straight in the eye and said 'I will never let you scan my face." :D
:D Thats sooo funny. Puhh

Posted: Thu Aug 17, 2006 10:13 am
by raja
NICE! Thanks for posting b-kandor! Waiting for mine.