Another factor that could have gone into this is the better hardware we now have access to. We’ve started using an IDeATe Alienware laptop to do our photo processing, and it’s made the whole process much cleaner. Because of how much stronger the laptop is than the machine’s we’ve been using, we’re able to create higher poly models without sacrificing days to the process.

Now that we have our first successful model, our goal is to use this process to create a full model. We’re going to test what happens if we do a lot of close-up shots on a person’s key features, like their face, and then follow those with full body shots. We hope that getting high-detail captures of key areas will let the software use those areas to better align the other photos it has, giving us the accuracy we were missing in our original tries.

We’ll be back next week with some new tests of this process, and hopefully with a full body model!

This week, we’ve started having our first successes. We redid a partially successful take at higher poly count / texture quality, and got the above model. The proportions are definitely still off, but it’s the first take where you can definitely tell that a human was the subject.

We suspected that the software was having some issues doing the humans as a whole, so we are in the process of trying to create a model from a set of photos focusing on a face. We don’t have a finished model yet, but the point clouds that were generated look very promising. You can pretty clearly see the outline of the head!

During this retake, we also ran into some issues with our software. Both of our licenses for Metashape ran out, so we’ve been trying to find replacement software. One contender that we’ve been trying is Meshroom, which you can see in the shot above. Meshroom is completely free (open source), and produces pretty good results for other people, so we decided to give it a try. Unfortunately, it turns out that you need a Cuda-enabled graphics card for it, or else you get results that look like this:

That’s it for this week! Hopefully our next post will contain some good shots of face models!

Our Glorious Failures so far..

Our objective for this semester is pretty simple, “Capture the Human” with photogrammetry. We do photogrammetry with Metashape and create a mesh from photos, which are taken from different perspectives. We are also planning to do retopology with other softwares to make our mesh more clean and suitable to be rigged.

At the first place, we were simply trying to take some amount of photo with our phone and make a mesh with Metashape. We tried more than 5 times with different settings, but we failed!

There are several critical problems from different reasons.

1. The Background
   When we took photos with transparent material background, such as glasses on the wall, it cause problem. Also, when we took photos in solid green-screen background and we planned to mask, but we failed.
   Lessons from this failure: Using not transparent – patterned background will help!
   
   
2. The Number of Photos
   It is quite simple problem! When we took not enough photos, result was bad. Lessons from this failure: Take photos as much as we can!
   
   
3. Texture
   This is also simple problem, when the person (we try to capture) wears black pants with no pattern with light absorbing texture, it is hard to capture.
   Lessons from this failure: Do not wear black pants without pattern!
   
   
4. Movement
   It is the hardest, major, critical problem, we are struggling right now. Because human is alive and it is extremely difficult to be standstill. You can check our photos above. Legs are more easy to not move, compare to head and arms. Legs part is more clear than others. But other parts are really hard to be capture because it is moving.
   Lessons from this failure: We should think about better way to capture; for example, capture bunch of photos at the same time(using camera rig or something else).

Capture The Human: Exploration with various photogrammetry tools and methods to capture the geometry of live human subject using standard equipment.

Paint The Fence: A virtual model of the famous CMU Fence that users can paint with their own designs, and see other versions.

Place The Art: An exploration into virtual spaces to exhibit and experience artistic works through the design of an infinite gallery in virtual reality.

Check back regularly to follow along as the teams document their progress.