Pardon my french, but this is fuckin’ cool. You’ll have to check out the video for the full skinny, but after you do be sure to hit the jump and let’s talk about what a scanner like this could mean for Indie Developers who don’t have the resources to hire an army of 3D sculptors!
Oh cool, you actually jumped, neato! So, if you’re interested in the development of games you probably already know that modeling 3D objects in today’s world of HD visuals is extremely challenging. Aside from a good low polygon base mesh, many games require meticulously sculpted high detail models from which normal maps can be generated in order to create the illusion of high detail on the low detail models actually used in the games themselves. While 3D artists and the tools they use have long ago come to a point where low poly models can be created with relative efficiency, high detail models can often take weeks, even months, to bring to a finished state. And these aren’t even models that go in the games, we’re talking here about models from which lighting detail is taken in order to facilitate an illusion in the game engine of more detail than is actually present.
For small studios this is a particularly frustrating and difficult issue with which to contend. The artists who can use these tools effectively often command large salaries, and for the scale and scope of some modern games you need a small army of them in order to get any project done in a timely fashion. For an Indie team, this can put some higher end options simply out of reach. Now, personally, I don’t see this as a roadblock because I believe that the best creative minds don’t come up against adversity and pummel their heads in shame, they look for an elegant solution, a way to create great art without relying on brute force alone. These, I believe, are in fact the true artists, and theirs is the true creativity in gaming.
Nevertheless, sometimes you just want to do some high detail shit, but if you’re an indie that’s an expensive proposition. But a device like this, at a cost of only $3,000 (I know, that’s actually a fair chunk of cash, but compared to the price of a high end modeler it’s peanuts), could raise the bar of what a small team could achieve. As long as they are able to produce the low poly models to drive the normal maps from these high detail models, they could potentially achieve very high end results for very little money. Indeed, I can easily imagine larger development studios using this technology to reduce the cost of producing some of these larger scale big budget games by drastically reducing the time required to produce the high detail models needed. Rather than building from scratch, you could simply scan something that’s reasonably close to your intended result and then tweak it from an already well developed state.
Worthy of consideration? Useful to the future of game development? What do you think?
The reason its being demoed in a garage is that those scanners are great for mechanical prototyping. maybe good for static props. But the thing to always remember in games is the topology of models are very important. I have not seen an auto solution create good optomized topology yet. Characters…forget it.
Actually, a study was recently performed which shows that 3D characters can be scanned and used in games very quickly, such that it’s one of the fastest methods possible, in fact
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https://publications.theseus.fi/bitstream/handle/10024/1374/using3ds.pdf?sequence=1