New 3D scanning..is anyone thinking this might be worth it, similar to Mocap for animation is now?

[Poenald Palen]

I have seen some vids of this, it is neato. But, now mesh is here....well, it could be a time saver for SL. I know there are artifacts and glitches and obvious issues whenever you convert or change something to do with such a complex object as a 3D object scan.

I have several questions!

Does anyone have any predictions, thoughts of even experiences with this and how it might all work out for workflow?

I figure, prep object, scan, seperate bits, decimate a bit or work on smoothing and otherwise reducing polygons, work on mats and remodelling, finally work on materials and textures, decimate a copy for test upload, export and test the Collada file. This seems like the general workflow. But, am I missing something?

Does anyone think it is worth what it costs for the gear if you primarily wish to use it mostly for SL?

 

Thanks for any response or replay that is on topic!

[Luc Starsider]

Sounds good. Do you have links to the videos?

- Luc -

[Wiz Daxter]

 

cool

[WolfBaginski Bearsfoot]

While I've done some work on 3D meshes elsewhere, I'm not in SL to be a creator. But, on what I've seen, these scanners are a very expensive tool, and not cost-effective for SL.

It is an area where 3D scanning and 3D printing are feeding off of each other, but I'd expect to see a few odd examples coming from people who use the resources at college. It's not really mesh-dependent: sculpties could come from this too, though it's not as easy.

[Luc Starsider]

This scanner in particular is not expensive ($0.99). It's an iOS app that use the front facing camera and the screen to capture an object in 3d.

It looks pretty cool, but without the export feature which enable you to export to a format suitable for importing to a 3d program, it seems gimmicky at best. The export feature is an extra $4.99, apparently.

As a 'proof of concept' type thing I can understand it, but it does not seem very useful (yet?) for any actual work. The reviews on iTunes are good, but they seem to be mostly about the coolness factor, and the fact it actually works as advertised.

I don't think I'll invest in the app.

- Luc -

[JustaTest]

Seems like you can do this with sculpted prims using a program called NOMI. Apparently it's been around for a while now. Here's the link to it.

http://kanae.net/secondlife/nomi.html

[Feynt Mistral]

This sort of thing has been available before using multiple web cams if I recall.  There's a project or two on Sourceforge about stereoscopic scanning if I remember the name correctly.  If I knew more about OpenCV I might try it myself with a webcam.  I know for a fact that there are people exploiting the Kinect to do this sort of thing, at least on a real time level grabbing the user's body shape and making a 3d shape out of it.  It isn't exported, but there's no reason you couldn't take it a step further and make statues out of whoever you scan with the Kinect.