Allt. Hij! Thank you for coming in. Thanks Linette and everybody who’s helped put this together. This is something that is a presentation I actually put together and gave in Melbourne. Men det var en ström. Så if anybody on live stream watch the Melbourne one, then you saw this already. And so in regards to natural environment stuff for, you know, since I was a kid, I was always pretty much interested in character and creature stuff. As far as doing environments, it’s something that back in the nineties when I got into 3D, I tried playing with some tools like Onyx Tree Pro, which was around in the nineties. But a tree would be one hundred thousand polys or two hundred thousand polys. And even loading that on up on a fifty thousand dollar SGI machine would pretty much kill it. And so I just figured it wasn’t like the time yet. And about four years ago just started messing around just to see how things had progressed and was just shocked at how mental ray and now is V-ray were able to handle and push polygons. And I started getting sort of obsessive about doing natural environment. So for the last four years, that’s kind of been my focus. And for this evening’s talk, something that about almost a year ago I got into was trying to use photogrammetry to build assets because a big part of doing environment work, at least for me, has been to build libraries. So building libraries of trees and plants and bushes and so forth. But for those types of things, you have really good procedural solutions. So tools like Speedtree and Onyx are great for making procedural plants and so forth. But when it comes to things like specific assets like a rock or a log or a tree, those are things that there aren’t great procedural tools for. And modeling those kinds of things is really hard. So anybody in here has tried to sculpt a rock and ZBrush knows that you immediately think it’s going to be easy and then you realize that it actually is a very, very challenging thing to pull off because things like trees and rocks and logs have their own anatomy to them and language that you need to be able to learn about and study. So with photogrammetry, this is something that I followed for a long time, too, because it’s been around since I think like 98 or 99 is when Paul Dubevec started doing his research with photogrammetry and The Matrix was the first movie that used it. But back then it was proprietary tools and then Image Modeler came out from RealViz, which allowed you to use photos to model geometry, but it didn’t really model the geometry for you. It created locators in 3D space and you still kind of had to model. So I kind of like didn’t really pay attention to it for a while. Then about a year ago saw some stuff that was going on with game studios that were using Photoscan and decided to start playing with it. And Agisoft, which is a software company, Photoscan is really cool and a straightforward, easy program to use once you know certain rules about how to shoot the photos. And that’s the kind of stuff we’ll be talking about tonight. I’ll try and be as specific with you as possible in regards to how to shoot your photos and how to prep them, how to process them in Photoscan, how to bring them into Zbrush, how to clean them up, how to go into Maya, just so that you can end up with a usable production asset because the geometry you get out of Photoscan can be really heavy. So some of the landscape stuff that I’ve done, this is all personal stuff. So just showing some different images using a variety of tools. So Maya is my main program that I use. And so everything kind of revolves around Maya for me. And so whether it’s Speedtree or Zbrush or World Machine or whatever, that’s kind of everything ends up in Maya and gets rendered in Vray. So this is something that’s fully 3D landscape. This is primarily World Machine. And it’s something that is a tool that I started using also about a year, year and a half ago. World Machine is amazingly cool. This is another World Machine landscape rendered in Maya with some bushes that I probably made in Speedtree or Paint Effects. This is a landscape that I did about a year and a half ago. And so this was for a DVD that I did just on using satellite data and satellite data is kind of low res. And so you kind of have to up res it and then populate it. So I’ve got tons of trees and slides here and bushes. But again, something that was missing in my library really was rocks and boulders and that kind of stuff, which again is kind of why photogrammetry seemed really appealing. And this is a very heavy scene. This scene is like 15 billion polygons, which you wouldn’t think. But that’s the cool thing of using proxies is that each tree in there, like those tiny little trees are hero trees. So they’re like two to four hundred thousand polygons per tree. So I could fly the camera all the way through the scene down into a tree through the leaves, which is kind of nuts. But that’s the cool thing about using proxies when you’re using renderers like V-Ray and mental, right? World Machine experiment, textured in Maya and rendered in V-Ray. Same kind of thing. And then this is where I started playing with scan stuff where I took a trip and we’ll be talking about that later out to a place that’s not far from here called Ladder Canyon and Painted Canyon, Death Valley, and wanted to create something along those lines and found a website that’s pretty cool called Surface Mimic. Some of you may have heard of it, where you can download some scan based or photogrammetry based assets and displacement maps and color maps. And they’re really, really cool to use in ZBrush. And so I download a couple of these rock photogrammetry generated grayscale displacement maps and started making alphas for ZBrush to sculpt with out of them and made a very simple environment in Maya that I blocked out real quick, brought that in ZBrush, started using those alphas. And since these alphas were generated from scans, the quality of what I got was really, really, really cool. And so that immediately made me feel like I need to learn how to make these myself. And so that’s where I wanted to figure out if Photoscan was something I could use. So this is a very quick process making this. This is this making the entire image from start to finish was probably, I’d say, about two or three hours. And so about 10 minutes in Maya, then about 45 minutes in ZBrush with alphas. I’m not sculpting. I’m using alphas with drag rectangle, which goes really fast. And then texturing it in Maya with just a library of rock shaders that I have. So that’s the whole thing with building libraries, that if you have a library of alphas, a library of rocks, trees, plants, whatever, these things can go fast. So when I say like I built this in three hours, it’s like, but I already had that tree model in my library and I already had these bushes in my library and I already had these little rocks to place around in the ground. And so just some more landscape experiments. These were the displacements coming from satellite data. This is another world machine experiment. I’ve built a library of alphas from world machine and displacement maps so that I can create terrain elements, mesas, canyons and then have planes in Maya that I can apply these displacement maps to and rotate them and move them around and do scene layout really, really quickly. And then this image is what we’re going to be mostly talking about this evening in regard as like an example. Just so I sort of needed to have something that I could break apart to discuss how the image was made. And there are photogrammetry based assets inside this image. And so this is also inspired by this road trip that I did out to the desert. And so. Let’s move on to that. So the first thing that I’m going to talk about here is the fact that with photogrammetry you have to go outside. Right. And so. But it’s an often awesome excuse to do that. And the nice thing about Southern California is that within five hours of here of L.A., you’ve got everything. And so I don’t know how many of you have taken road trips. But Death Valley is only five hours from here. And so five hours northeast. And so we’re getting to the time of year that you don’t want to go. It’s in August. It’s the hottest place on earth. So it can get to be like one hundred and thirty five degrees there which is crazy. When I went it was like in the 70s. Right now it’s probably in the 80s. And the first time I went to Death Valley I actually went to Death Valley shot photos all day and came back the same day. So you have to like to drive and I love driving. So like I really don’t mind getting in my car and going places. And so that’s Valley is something that has been used in tons of films and movies. And so I just Google Death Valley Star Wars like I knew it was a location for that. And immediately a website popped up that has like all the locations in Death Valley where they shot certain scenes. And you can see like these are people dressed up as a Yoda finding these locations and so forth. So it’s really really beautiful and super super cool. And so here I’m just going to show you where it is. I just did a Camtasia recording from Google Earth. And so there we are in L.A. And then five hours northeast. There’s Death Valley National Park and it’s really really large. And so zooming in here there is a really really cool little canyon called Titus Canyon that you can drive your car down. And so that’s it right there. So when you get into Death Valley you have to actually drive through Death Valley on a highway into Nevada and then you enter this canyon right there and you drive your car all the way down and exit there. And so and I’m showing you this kind of stuff because really if you want to collect awesome assets for photogrammetry you have to go to places where these things are. So some of you may have seen like the kite demo on the unreal kite demo where they also talked about some photogrammetry stuff and they’re like and we went to Scotland and New Zealand and it’s like well that’s rad but that’s far. So I’d love to be able to go to Iceland or Scotland and do a photogrammetry excursion. But with the Sequoia National Park Death Valley the desert you really can find places that are absolutely stunningly beautiful within a drive and then you just walk through these places drive through these places and you just see a cool rock and you’re like I want that rock. I want that tree. I want that cliff. And you just start taking photos of it knowing when you get back home you’re going to have that as an asset. So this is the drive approaching Titus Canyon from the Nevada side. And so this trip to Death Valley for me was actually a photography trip. It wasn’t actually a photogrammetry trip. And so I wanted to just spend a couple of days doing HGR photography and sort of processing it through Lightroom and Photomatics and trying to just get tried practice photography because I’ve learned in wanting to do landscapes that the best thing I can do is really study what I my tastes are in regards to composition and try and get better at that and how I want to color grade my photos to have them give them a certain look and just experiment with that whole process. And if you do it via photography you just get to try so many different things so much faster than you will with your 3D work. And so you just get a lot of inspiration kind of baked into your mind. So once I approach Titus Canyon this is what it starts to look like. And it is this really really cool canyon. You can see this is basically the width of a car and with the warm colored rocks and the cool lighting from the sky above it’s just really really beautiful and you get beautiful inspiration for ideas and what you might want to do and utilize in the environments that you’re creating. And so this is just again all of these are processed in Lightroom. But that’s something that ultimately I think a lot of us are doing with our 3D work to whether it’s color grading and DI that you’re doing a nuke or you’re doing in another tool. This is something that is a good thing to also try and experiment and that’s what I was trying to do with this project. And so as we drive through just a lot of great examples of lighting and bounce light. Here we’re now exiting Titus Canyon and then when you get out of Titus Canyon then you see the valley of Death Valley and it’s massive. It’s really really huge. So has anybody in here been to Death Valley. So a few of you I really really recommend just getting some friends together and drive out before August. So because of that trip to Death Valley I definitely was like I want to be able to make environments that look like that specifically. So I’m going to try and build a library of assets that I’m going to try and get into photogrammetry and ideally that’s going to give me a faster approach to build these kinds of things because if you were going to try to make something like this where you’re just going to sculpt a base mesh and Maya or Z brush and dynamesh it and start sculpting with like damn standard and the standard brush. I mean it will take you a while right because it is really there’s so much chaotic detail in nature and so that’s where you need to find a faster faster approach. So yes you can hand sculpt it but do you have a week to do that. And so the faster you can approach things while still maintaining art direction and artistic control the more fun you will have. So for creating the image that I showed you earlier these ultimately become the steps. So I need to create a library of elements with photogrammetry. I need to lay out scenes and my composition in Maya. I then detail these things using World Machine and Z brush and then obviously materials lighting and rendering compositing. I’m still doing most of my composite Photoshop. I know I should switch to switch to Nuke. I’m very aware of that but I’m just still very used to doing it in Photoshop and I’m working on stills for personal work primarily and then color grading. I have an awesome plug in for after effects called Magic Bullet that I really really like a lot which is the color grading plugin. So we’re going to go through all of these steps that are right there. So starting with photogrammetry. So photogrammetry is creating 3D models from 2D photographs. And so for this image as an example. This is what the geometry looks like and this is what for this image is photo scan or photogrammetry based. So it’s not the entire image. It’s just in the end some assets that are useful a tree trunk a tree things that ultimately are hero assets in the sense that if you look at them up close are incredibly detailed and awesome because they come from photogrammetry but because I made them so quickly through that process I don’t mind using them just for set dressing and putting this log over here and this rock over here in this boulder. So for these assets I needed to first go through the process of finding a place that I wasn’t as far as Death Valley to start collecting rocks and logs and whatever. So what I’m showing you here now is sort of this trip that I took another road trip to start shooting photos of things for the purposes of photogrammetry. So has anybody been here. Nobody’s been here. All right. Ladder Canyon is only two and a half hours away. So if you know where Palm Springs is Palm Springs is like two hours east. See like just get on the tent and go that way. And then when you get to Palm Springs you just keep going south from there and there’s the Salton Sea which is actually pretty massive and pretty cool place to check out. And it’s really really close to the Salton Sea. So it’s not a national park but it’s this canyon which is like this five mile loop that you can hike and it’s called Ladder Canyon because somebody I don’t know who because this isn’t a national park. This isn’t like the you know state putting this stuff there but there’s like these metal ladders everywhere and you can see that’s a big one. And so you’re just trusting that these ladders work and a lot of them are pretty tattered and broken but it’s really really cool. And so here I’m going to show you where Ladder Canyon is. And so we’re zooming in. You can see there’s a Salton Sea right there. And so there’s Palm Springs right up there. And so from Palm Springs it’s just another maybe 20 or 30 minutes. And then this right here is where you park your car. And when I went there there was probably like four cars or something like that. I didn’t see a soul for the five hours because it’s this basically you hike in there and it’s this whole loop that you go around that has slot canyons. So places like Arizona and Utah are more known for slot canyons like Antelope Valley. But this is actually like a very local two hour drive to a slot canyon which is really really pretty. So here’s some photos of that area. So this is me sort of approaching a lot of canyon. This is where you park your car. And in the end it’s like you look at these forms and these shapes and these are so so cool. And it’s like it’s one thing to do a Google image search for like cool landscape cool rocks cool cliff and we all find the same stuff. But really just going to these places is a million times more inspiring if you have the time you know and it really isn’t that far. So then you start hiking and then you end up inside the canyon. And so as opposed to Titus Canyon where it’s wide enough for a car and Ladder Canyon Paden Canyon at some point it’s only like a foot wide two feet wide. You’re kind of scooting through this little canyon and it’s really really really cool. All sorts of different rock types because Ladder Canyon loops around into what’s called painted canyon because there’s so many different types of minerals and rocks there that it’s just very very colorful. That’s my little R2D2. So that’s actually my R2D2 that I’ve had since I was a kid. So I’ve had that since 1978. This tattered little R2D2 and I just thought it’d be cool to place them in some of the photos because the thing that’s cool about that and that has become very very apparent is that when you have assets especially things like rocks cliffs and boulders scale from micro to macro with natural stuff is not readily apparent. So meaning that is this area five feet across or is this area 100 feet across right with that guy there it looks like it’s a much larger space that it is. And so I bring that up just meaning that you can do you can create an asset from a boulder or a rock but ultimately once you get it in your scene whether it’s Maya Unreal or whatever you could use this as a massive object or a tiny object and it still kind of looks correct. And so same thing here. There is so it looks like this like epic kind of sci fi vista but it’s really just this sort of relatively small area where if I was standing here I’d be like you know pretty large. And so it’s another cool way to come up with interesting compositions because then with your camera you’re just looking around for interesting angles interesting ways to try and perceive this environment that you could use for your own work. So like this is only like this big of an area but you could see that this could easily work as being 500 yards wide with this village inside here with a castle that’s over. It’s like it could work for that perfectly fine. And so if you think of it that way these assets become really useful. So moving on to the photography what I’m showing here is just basically one of my folders you can see like photogrammetry cliffs and then like all these different photo sets that I had after this trip for Ladder Canyon where I saw something that I thought was kind of cool like the wall of a cliff and figured all right I’m going to take photos of that. And so you end up walking around an object and maybe you a lot of detail in regards to that process. And so here is another thing. This is very large. So this is probably at least like 50 feet tall. And so the smaller the object the easier it is to take photos because if it’s small like I’m taking photos of this then it’s just like click click click click click click I got my photos when you have something that’s 50 feet tall then you’re like click walk 15 feet that way click and it just takes a while longer to walk around the object. But it still works. Here was just a cool bundle of rocks on the ground which I felt could be a cool asset to have and so for this I’m shooting just a rock that I found. I brought a tripod with me so that I could get the top and the bottom of things with things like a cliff face. You’re talking about a flat object so you’re not going all the way around in a circle 360 degrees with that object while with a rock you’re going to end up wanting to. And here’s another example of a piece of wood that I found on that trip. So like this piece of wood is crazy like it’s really really complicated would be a very very complex thing to model if you were going to model that thing by hand and Z brush. This is a hero asset that you’re going to go and do but with photogrammetry you can have assets that are this cool just as secondary assets that are part of a library that you can populate. So here’s some renders from V-Ray of some of these things after they went through a photo scan got cleaned up in Z brush got retopologized UVs textured projected from the photos and then in my rendered as an asset. So some really cool cliff faces. Look pretty neat. Some rocks and so you know is this rock this big or is this rock a massive boulder like in reality I know it was about this big but not really really clear or evident. And then here’s that really really cool piece of wood which is about that big really small. I tried doing a skull this is a ram skull that I had at home. I was just curious if photo scan could pull this off and I was insanely impressed. I mean I have a four million or five four or five million poly model of this you know from photo scan is just like having that in Z brush and just spinning around this ram skull. I was just like dude this is the coolest thing in the world. I mean it’s like if you tried to sculpt this ram skull the way it is from reality it would take so much skill time and talent not to say that’s not a worthwhile pursuit but ultimately photogrammetry exists for those things that exist in the real world. Some people are like well is photogrammetry going to mean that we don’t need modelers anymore. Of course not. But for things like this or a tree trunk or a rock well those things you can get and you can find outside but things that are designed and made up will always need modelers for that. So. Now we’re getting into some more specific details here. When I was researching photogrammetry and photo scan and how to use it for some reason I couldn’t really find a lot of information. The manual is not great which is pretty typical with software and I couldn’t really find much on YouTube or Google searching in regards to step by step and specific rules. And so what you have here is basically based on me doing spending hundreds of hours going through the process. This is what I found works for me. So I’m not saying that I’m the authority and if somebody knows more I’d love to learn. You know so you’re more than welcome to talk to me later and tell me things that I was totally wrong about. But what I’m showing you does work and I’ve done it over and over and over and over and over again on dozens of assets and it’s pretty solid. So first thing is you need a decent camera. So I’m using a Canon 5D Mark 2 so which is probably four years old. So having a newer camera the tire megapixel would be awesome. You’ll get a much heavier model with a much higher rest texture but ultimately my 5D Mark 2 worked great. So you do not want to use your iPhone. So yes you can get it download an app where you can go and take pictures of something and uploads to the cloud and it gives you a model like you know you’ve probably all seen these photogrammetry apps and they’re cool but what you’re getting is really really low res. And so what I wanted was really really high resolution assets where any of the assets I was creating could be a hero asset right up in the camera and 4K renders. So then the lenses I’m using are prime fixed lenses. And so as you probably know there are zoom lenses right where you can zoom in and zoom out and your lens goes from a 24 to 105 or something like that. You can use a zoom lens for photogrammetry but the thing is the software will do a better job if all of your pictures are shot with the same focal length. Right. So all of the pictures are shot 35 or they’re all 50 or so forth. And with the zoom lens you have the danger of walking around an object and accidentally touching the zoom dial and now they’re not necessarily all the same. So I just think it’s safer to use a fixed prime lens although newer zoom lenses some of them have locks on them so you can lock the focal length and you won’t accidentally mess it up. Manual mode is very important. This is where iPhones and cell phones become problematic in regards to how they shoot pictures. Every photo needs to be shot with the same exposure. And so the f stop the shutter speed the ISO and so forth are all things that you need to take into serious consideration. I’m going to have a slide here that’s going to get into that in more detail. I shoot in raw and so that’s because you have a much more light information and raw. You don’t have the JPEG compression artifacts because you’re going to end up getting textures as well. Remember photogrammetry you get a model that is textured right. And so the photographs not only create the model they get projected by the software to create the full 3D texture for your object and by shooting in raw since it has plus or minus two stops of light information that makes it easier for delighting the texture. Ten degrees between each photo with a fixed point of interest one to three rows depending on the object. 36 photos per row tells you how many pictures you’re potentially going to end up with or 18 photos for a 180 degree object so meaning picture 10 degrees picture 10 degrees picture 10 degrees picture. That’s what seems to be working perfectly fine for all the assets that I’ve been doing. So to get into more detail about those bullet points again can in 5D Mark 2 which shoots basically a five to six K image right. So here we have the pixel resolution of the photos that I shoot on the camera. Now Canon has a new camera that came out in the last year the 5DS which I would love to have but I don’t have and it shoots almost 9K photos. Those are really really really high res just Google the 5DS example and look at some of like the raw photos out of that thing. They’re huge. Well is there a benefit to having that versus the camera I have. Yes because the higher the megapixel the photos are the higher as the model will be and the higher as the textures will be. So with my 5D Mark 2 the models that I’m getting are between 2 and 10 million polygons depending on how much of the photograph the object fits right. So if I’m shooting a photograph of a cliff face the cliff face probably fills the whole frame and I’m probably going to get a 10 million poly model but if I’m shooting a skinny log that might only fill 15 percent of screen space. So it might only be one or two million polys. So if I had the 5DS I would just be getting much much higher rest stuff and the textures I’m getting with my 5D Mark 2 are about 4K usable textures with the 5DS you’d probably be able to get 8K. The only issue would be that photo scan you’ll see when we get to it isn’t the fastest thing in the world and has to process. You have to wait for the software to do its thing. And so I can imagine with a 5DS and be even slower but I haven’t tried that yet. So so higher higher the resolution higher res model and texture. There you go. There you go. So in regards to prime lenses. So these are the lenses that I am using. Prime lenses also are known for having superior optics and so as opposed to a zoom lens that has multiple pieces of glass in it a prime lens is going to have fewer elements you get a sharper image generally. And so the nice thing about having good lenses is just the fact that you want when you zoom into your image 100 percent whether it’s in Photoshop or Lightroom the whole thing to be in focus be sharp you know be consistent from the center to the corner of the image. Sometimes cheap lenses look fine and look cool but sometimes like the image gets a little darker as it goes to the corner or you get chromatic aberration which everybody is adding to their images these days. But you ideally don’t want in the renders you’re going to be using for photogrammetry. So more expensive lenses tend to not have that. So these lenses are cannons L series lenses and so they are a little bit pricier. But if you’re a studio that it’s definitely a worthwhile investment to have this kit available for your crew that wants to do photogrammetry cheaper lenses will work just fine. It’s just you’ll have fewer headaches if you sort of follow some of these guidelines. So in regards to manual mode when you’re shooting your photos this is really really important. And so I’m sure that a lot of you in here have probably used manual traditional point and shoot digital SLR cameras and some of you maybe haven’t. So if any of you are used to really where you’re like cell phone was like your first real camera then you have some stuff to learn to get comfortable with in regards to using a real camera. But it’s all things you want to know about anyway especially if you’re going to become an artist in our industry because artists in our industry whether you’re lighters or art directors or concept artists or 3D artists whatever knowing about ISO and f stop and shutter speed are all things that are very valuable things to know to understand how cameras work. But in regards to photogrammetry you really want all of the images to have the same exposure settings that in a big way has to do with the textures right because as you go around the object of all of your photos are shot with the same exposure settings then as it projects the photos onto your model to give you the texture then it’s going to look correct because they’re all lit in the exact same way. Then your f stop your f stop. I found 11 plus is really what you need so in a camera you have the thing that lets the whole that lets the light in right your aperture and your f stop is what controls the size of that. So a small f stop like an f 1.4 the opening gets a lot larger and a high f stop like f 11. The opening is getting a lot smaller right. The smaller the opening is or the higher the f stops it’s counterintuitive but the smaller the opening is the less light that’s coming in. But conversely what’s also happening is the shallower your depth or the larger your depth of field is getting. And so meaning that you’ve seen a photo where it’s a portrait of somebody in the background all blurred out as opposed to a photo of somebody where the background still in focus. What’s controlling that depth of field is your f stop. And so with photogrammetry you want everything in focus. You ideally want the entire image completely in focus the front of the rocks and focus the back of the rocks and focus so that photo scan can properly grab onto that thing and build the model and project the textures. So shallow depth of field where lots of the image is going out of focus will become very problematic. And so f stop of 11 plus on my 5D Mark 2 really has become a rule that I have to follow. Then in regards to the ISO 800 or less because the ISO is the sensitivity of your film or of your CCD on your camera how sensitive it is to light. But if you put your ISO too high 1600 30 200 6400 you start to get noise and you don’t really want noise because you’re going to be projecting these images onto your model to create the textures and you don’t want them to be noisy. So with my camera ISO 800 the noise isn’t really noticeable. And so I feel like I can go that high and then your shutter speed. This depends on how steady you are holding a camera. And so if you are as steady as a tripod this would be irrelevant. But the reality is no matter how still you try and hold the camera you’re moving a little bit. You’re breathing it’s windy and whatever. And so do I use a tripod or not. Well if you’re out in Ladder Canyon and there’s boulders and there’s rocks everywhere using a tripod would really slow you down big time. Right. Because then you have to set the tripod up for every photo that you’re taking. So it’s so much more convenient to just like take a picture walk two steps to the right take a picture so that you can take all of the pictures you need in like a minute by just walking around the object and snapping. But if you’re hand holding a picture then you have the danger of motion blur. Right. Because if you move that camera while you take the picture it’s going to get a little blurry. So how do you compensate with that. Well breathe and think every time you take the picture that you’re trying to have a steady hand but also have a fast shutter speed. The faster your shutter speed the less motion blur you get. So I know that what I’m saying in regards to this slide anybody in here is really experienced with cameras is going to seem very rudimentary but it’s very important to get good results out of photoscan. So I just kind of feel like I need to illustrate that. So the thing is is that when you have rules right. F stop has to be above 11. ISO needs to be a below 800 shutter speed needs to be one twenty fifth of a second or faster. All of a sudden becomes this balancing act because if you set them all to that number and take a picture it might be completely underexposed or under or overexposed. And so you have to adjust those three things with these parameters to get a properly exposed image. So this is a great diagram. It was going around Facebook a while ago and I thought it was a great diagram to show people that explains your F stop shutter speed and ISO in regards to how it affects an image. And so I think for those of you who aren’t super used to using cameras and thinking about this this really explains it really really well. Right. So you can see when the aperture is small. Everything’s going to be in focus right. The foreground in the background F 1.4 lens foreground background background gets blurry. So now the lower the F stop the lens is the more expensive they are like an F 1.4 lens can be pretty pricey. So but in the end for photogrammetry you don’t need that you don’t need a lens that goes down to F 1.4 because ultimately you want things as sharp as possible. And again your shutter speed. So a slow shutter speed you’re going to get a lot of motion blur. So if you take the picture and your camera goes click click. It’s like well that’s too slow because chances are you moved a little bit. Something you’re going to get a soft photo and the thing that I think we probably all know is when you use digital cameras or your phone and you take pictures and you look at them at the screen that’s this big you’re like that’s sharp that looks awesome. Take another picture that’s sharp that looks awesome because you’re looking at this tiny screen and then you get on your computer and Lightroom or Photoshop you zoom in at 100 percent and blurry right. So that’s what we’re trying to avoid is we want our photos to be sharp at 100 percent which just means taking care with some of these things. And then ISO again you’re adjusting the sensitivity of your of your CCD but it’s basically going to give you a lot of noise. If the ISO gets too high. So I tend to keep it below 800. I do not. So but you know where since this is being live streamed and the live stream is being recorded you could always go to the live stream later and just sort of screen grab it from that. So in regards to taking the pictures. So 10 degrees between each photo with a fixed point of interest. So this is a tree trunk that I did and those blue rectangles represent where I took where I took a photo. And so that’s something that photo scan ends up showing you once you process an asset. So one to three rows of photos depending on the object a tree trunk doesn’t really have a top and a bottom. It’s a cylinder and therefore walking around this object and shooting a picture every 10 degrees works fine. You’re going to basically capture what you need for the most part. And when I say 10 degrees am I measuring that out. No I was worried when I first got into this you have to be super precise. You don’t at all. Right. So it’s just like you’re just kind of eyeballing it like the size of the object my distance to go around this thing and take 36 pictures. I think it’s one step. I think it’s two steps. So you can see when you look at these the spacing between them isn’t totally even because they didn’t really measure out an accurate 10 degree arc around the street because then that would take forever if you had to do that and you really don’t. So something flat like a cliff face you would only need 18 photos and a lot of the cliff faces I did I only had like 14 or 15 and they worked fine. So here are some trees that I’ve done. And so these a lot of these are from Griffith Park. And so Griffith Park is only 20 minutes from here. And so I just waited for a cloudy morning because as a lot of you have ever shot textures before know that ideally you’re shooting things on cloudy days right because you really don’t want direct sunlight on your objects. If you have direct sunlight on your objects that’s fine in regards to making the geometry making the model but it’s bad for the texture because in your texture is going to have all the lighting baked in the sunlight the cast shadows and all that stuff and we really want to avoid that. So I waited for a day that was cloudy. Which we’ve had a lot of those lately. And so in the morning on a cloudy day I went to Griffith Park as you imagine there’s hundreds of trees there and I just walked around for like four hours and just like battery looks cool and just like walked in a circle around the tree and then just looked around and that tree over there looks cool and walked up to it and walked a circle and it was an awesome chill morning to just do that with headphones. And then basically I have those trees as assets now which is really really cool and I think that for any of us who have tried to model and sculpt and Z brush a rock or a tree and texture it using textures from CG textures that we tile and we lay stuff or whatever it’s like and you think you did a good job and then you look at these. It’s just like Jesus these look nice. Because it’s reality you know and like the complexity of reality is just this is not a tiling texture going all the way up that tree trunk right like you can just tell it’s like it’s just different everywhere to do that by hand to sculpt that. I mean we all know that sculpting on cylindrical objects is kind of a pain in Z brush anyway because it’s like sculpt rotate sculpt rotate. I mean it’s like if you could rotate and sculpt at the same time that would be awesome but we can’t yet so these are really really cool assets that again are millions of polys with 8K textures. They’re super tack sharp if they’re 4K but they’re technically 8K when I’m getting out of photo scan so I can zoom in to these tree trunks pretty close. So it’s really really really awesome. So in regards to shooting the photos just some more info. This is painted canyon and so here I’m just showing an asset that I just thought was a cool little area that I wanted to take pictures of. Now things like a rock or a log that you find on the ground you can pick it up and move it to the shade because sometimes it’s cloudy and then the clouds go away. Like what are you going to do with that. Well if you just drove four hours you’re going to just kind of deal with it. And so ultimately the answer in that is really look for things that are in the shade. Stop looking in the sunlight look for things that are in the shade and shooting objects in the shade works pretty well. So this object that I’m shooting there’s a little bit of sunlight hitting it there and there but I’m actually really interested in this area down here and if there’s a little sunlight in the upper left corner once I project the texture and I’m like I can see the area that had sunlight I can just clone it out and so there’ll be some cleanup on the texture. So here is what the photos look like for that asset. And so I’m just in light room. And so you can see as I’m going around the objects trying to roughly do a 10 degree per picture thing. And you can see what I mean by a fixed point of interest. So you can see it’s this area that’s in the middle there that as I walked around this object I was kind of keeping that in the middle of my viewfinder and so that I’m like interested in this specific area. And that’s all I really needed with these photos. And so taking these photos didn’t take long. And again they’re all shot in raw on the 5D and I’m exposing the image and looking on the viewfinder to make sure that the area I’m interested is exposed correctly is bright enough. And so you can see down here that I’ve got a lot of relatively flat lighting because it is in the shade. So cloudy day is ideal but things in shade really do work OK. So and this is a V-Ray render of that asset. So here we have another thing. This is a rock. So like I just said it was sunny on one side of the canyon shade on the other side of the canyon. So I picked this rock up moved over to the shaded side propped it up balanced it and then walked around the object taking pictures. And it should be very apparent looking at these photos that I’m using the exact same exposure settings on all of the photos. So it’s set to manual. And so as I go through that so yeah in these middle photos the background gets super overexposed. But that’s fine because it’s the rock that’s maintaining consistent exposure across all of the photos. Now this is something being a round object that I wanted to be able to get the top and the bottom of it. And so for this I realized one row wasn’t going to cut it. So I walked around the object shooting 36 photos from above a little bit. And then walked around it crouching down and shooting photos from below. And so this gave me two rows for this object. You kind of need to judge when you’re taking the photos is everything that you’re interested in of that asset visible in the photos that you’re taking which is pretty straightforward. So to recap a lot of the things I just said. So when you’re outdoors avoid direct sunlight clouds or shade studio lighting is possible for small to medium objects which I’m going to talk about a little bit later. And so here what I’m saying is that you can grab things like a small rock a small log bring it back to your studio and set up a indoor lighting setup to do photogrammetry. It just means that you want soft lighting. So the reason that we want to shoot on a cloudy day is you don’t want direct hard light coming from a small light source like I’m getting on me right now where it casts really hard shadows you want the sky as your light source like an HDR. You just want this soft huge light source coming from all directions that creates soft self shadows and no obvious sharp reflections on the object. So if you’re shooting in a studio though you will need to use strobes if you’re shooting indoors. So if I was going to take a space like this and decide I want to set up a little photogrammetry area with lights you can do that using large soft boxes to illuminate the object and so at home in my garage I’ve set that up so I got some soft boxes and set up a little lazy Susan and I’ll show you some pictures of that. But then you need remote triggers to trigger the strobes. You need to know how to use strobes. You need a tripod. Lazy Susan. Let me show you a photo. So this is what my garage looks like. Now that I’m in the photogrammetry. So for this log the thing is is that it was so complicated. The shape of it from all angles that it didn’t seem like something that would work very well to shoot out like in the field and it was only this big and it was really light. So it was a really easy thing to carry or throw in a backpack and decide to capture later and I could therefore by shooting it in a studio setting make sure that I’m getting much getting even lighting while also getting very sharp pictures and make sure that I’m really capturing this thing from every angle. So if you are interested in setting something like this up I’ll just say that it gets more expensive because if you just go outside with a camera using available light you’re just walking around things and grabbing assets like crazy. But with this you do need ultimately as you can see some more equipment. So what I have here is four soft boxes using Einstein strobes. They’re relatively inexpensive strobes but they are still like 400 dollars a piece and there’s four of them in here. A lazy Susan this thing right here painted white with 10 degree markings. I just ordered that off Amazon. It was black and I painted it white. And so it’s just a round disk that I guess people put on their dining tables or in cupboards but it just spins around. And so that’s something that’s very very useful in the studio setting. I should point out that as opposed to in the field where you’re walking around an object in the studio setting the camera is fixed and the object is spinning. The object is rotating which photo scan works very very well with which is kind of nice because you don’t have to move. So and then I have a white seamless backdrop. So the issue that I’m trying to achieve here in a studio setting is even lighting. So why do I have all of these lights from all these directions and why everything is painted white is I want soft white even lighting from all directions. And so soft boxes most of these I ordered online BH photo dot com is an awesome website for photo gear and these are just light modifiers. So they’re Einstein strobes with large modifiers on them. Here’s another photo. And when I mentioned strobes these lights are continuous lighting right. So they’re always on strobes are flash right. And so some of you who have tried photography may be very familiar with strobes. I wasn’t really familiar with strobes when I got into this so I kind of had to learn about the process which was fairly straightforward. But ultimately the issue is is that I did have some soft boxes that were continuous lights right. Five hundred watts a thousand watts flip them on they always are they’re always on. We have a few of those because of the no man workshop. Right. So we’re filming people drawing we have some soft boxes on them and that works fine. They’re always on lights but the problem is they’re only like five hundred watts or a thousand watts which sounds bright but it really isn’t because if in my garage I used continuous lighting and had to shoot photos for photogrammetry I would be impossible for me to get the exposure that I really want for it to be bright enough and not really look noisy like it’s possible but I’d end up having to crank my ISO in order to get the exposure to look right. So what’s amazingly cool about strobes is just that they only flash for a second but they’re really damn bright. These strobes can be brighter than the sun. So like I could go outside with one of these strobes and flash it and the picture will look like this picture of this person was shot at night where the strobe is the only thing lighting them. That’s how bright these things are. And so which is pretty rad. And so what it means is that you can get an incredibly fast shutter speed with a incredibly low ISO of 100 with the f stop being very very high. So the picture is tack sharp. So what I learned by using strobes to shoot the photos with so much intense bright lighting hitting the object is that these photos with the camera on a tripod when I zoom in at 100 percent in Lightroom or Photoshop are razor sharp like completely in focus. Every little detail on the log on the rock or whatever is razor sharp at 100 percent which for the purposes of photo scan gives you a better model and for the purpose of the textures means you’re going to get sharper higher res textures. Then the other thing that’s really really cool are these little guys pocket wizards their remote triggers. So on my 5D I have a pocket wizard which is a transmitter so that whenever I click my shutter sends a signal out to these pocket wizards that are connected to the strobes that are set to be receivers. They’re all on the same channel. And so when I take a picture with my camera all four strobes flash at the same time. And so and the nice thing is that it’s all wireless. And so these little guys are about one hundred and twenty five dollars on VH photo. And then on my camera I have a remote trigger so that I’m not touching the camera body when I take a picture because that could produce a little bit of shake. And so by having a remote trigger which is plugs into a jack on the camera you have a little wire and you have a button in your hand. I just push the button camera takes the photo all of the strobes flash since it’s all automated at that point like that. All I need to do is have my hand or my foot on the lazy Susan and just button move button move button move button move button and that’s how you’re shooting the pictures. It’s very fast. And so you’ll see over here that on the lazy Susan there’s little marks of tape and a little mark on the table right there so that I know that it’s 10 degrees and I just know like rotate click rotate click. So here I’m showing photos that are shot in my garage of a log that’s a birch log. And this is something that I really wasn’t sure how photo scan was going to do with because if you look at it you can see that there’s a lot of detail and a first of all look at how sharp the photos are like which is pretty awesome. But this birch log also has like bark that’s peeling off and like would photo scan be able to handle that. I wasn’t sure yet. In the end it did which was amazing. And so you can see the photos look like for this it has a lot of photos. And so I have 36 photos for a top down straight on and below. So it’s over 100 photos for this one asset. And so here I’m just going through the second row. At the end of that row you can see there was a blank shot and then going through and then the top the blank shot is necessary to create a mask in photo scan which you’ll see later when we get into the whole issue of masking. It’s a way for photo scan to auto mask things for you. If anybody has used photo scan in here knows about masking you don’t want to do it manually. So the other issue is the raw image format. So shooting in raw gives you a increased dynamic range but the images are bigger. But that doesn’t really matter because hard drives are cheap. So and cards for your cameras are cheap. So you shoot in raw. You have a higher dynamic range. And so when you shoot in raw you can adjust the exposure of your image after you shoot it. So just like HDR. So we are used to HDR having this huge dynamic range where you shoot like 12 stops of light information and merge it into an HDR. But ultimately a raw image on a Canon or a Nikon are basically kind of like a raw image. So you have more light information that you see at one time. But it’s really useful for delighting. And so there’s multiple techniques out there for delighting. This is a solution I came up with as I was figuring out my own. It may not be the best but it is really really easy which you’ll see. So my workflow is after I have the photos that are all in raw. Photo scan doesn’t support raw. You can’t import your raw images into photo scan. So you have to convert them to TIFF. So I take my photos that I shot on my camera, copy them to the computer. They’re all in raw. They’re all in Lightroom. I can then, and you can use any image editor that you want to browse them but Lightroom is really easy. And so in Lightroom I can just basically look at that directory of images of raw files. Did I shoot a double photo here? That’s junk. I need to delete that. Make sure the directory has the right photos in it. Then at that point I export that as TIFF because photo scan reads TIFF files. But I will then also export another version of those photos where I adjusted the exposure on them to try and reduce the lighting information. Where I lower the highlights and I boost the shadows in Lightroom and it flattens the image out to almost look delid. So Lightroom is the tool that I’m using for that. And so when I’m delighting the raw images in Lightroom I can do it on one of the photos and then copy paste what I did to that one to all 100 photos that are in the set. So you don’t have to do it one at a time. So here I’m going to show that process. And so here is that Birch log. And so just zooming in on it going to the develop tab. And on the right side you’ll see there is an exposure slider. You also have highlights and shadows and I’m boosting the shadows and then taking the highlights and lowering them down. And so ultimately the image looks semi delid. It’s not you know technically accurately perfectly delid but it’s a great start point and it actually looks perfectly fine for textures. So all of the renders I have assets are really using this strategy. Because it’s super super fast. So one thing that I’d like to try is like you know I think it was the epic kite demo where they sort of talked about how they did it and they are shooting HDR and chrome balls and using that to create the lighting information from that location to figure out how to delight. And I watched that and was like that looks complicated. So that’s probably is a much better way to do it but this way is kind of fine. It really gives good results. So here I just copy and pasted the settings from that one to all of the other ones. So I’m just selecting all of the photos in that library. And then just right click paste. And I’ve now delid delid all of the photos for this asset and then I can export that out as a directory of tips. So I have two directories of tips one that are the raw photos converted to one that are delid. So you can see here as it loads in those settings what it looks like after that process. So you get nice flat lighting which is really what you want. All right. So now we’re moving to photo scan. So photo scan as I mentioned creates textured 3D models from photos. But the models that it creates in photo scan are really really heavy. There are millions of polygons. Now it depends again on the megapixel of your camera but you can end up with models in photo scan. There are millions of polygons. And so and as you know you don’t necessarily want to bring that kind of stuff into a game engine or into Maya because Maya once you have like 10 million polys in viewport is not happy. Right. So you can use proxies and use display layers but ultimately for the efficiency of a library you need to decide what your polygon count is for your assets and you’ll end up having to do that clean up in a tool like Maya or Z brush. And there’s lots of tools for model cleanup. I use my own Z brush so you’re going to ultimately have holes in the model from photo scan because an area of the model wasn’t in any of your photographs that you took so it’s going to have a hole. You have to fill that in as the brush sculpt on it. So dynamesh and remesh and Z brush are fricking on believable for this process. So if this was like three years ago and we didn’t have dynamesh and Z rush remesh I might have gone down this road and gone to Z brush and was like when just been like do I have to manually retopo this thing and so forth because that would slow things down a lot. But there’s certain things where topology is really important. Right. And there are certain things where topology being precise is less important. And when you’re talking about a rock that’s going to be on the ground over there or a log that’s going to be over there do I need my topology to be perfect. Well I’m not going to rig the thing. So I personally don’t really care. And then I think personally the remesher does an amazing job of remeshing things to a target polygon count with an edge flow that’s actually pretty accurate to the curvature changes of the model. And so I’m able to bring my models from photo scan into Z brush remesh them and you view them very very quickly. And then I have to view them and process normal maps. So I’m going to be showing you this process in photo scan so you’ll see it. So these are the steps. So this is the order in which you do things when you are in photo scan meaning you start with your photos which we’ve talked about and then you get them converted to TIFF. You launch photoscan you import your photos and you do this stuff in this order. So you’ve got to build the heavy model and photoscan. Then you’ve got to go over to Z brush and Maya and clean it up. You’re going to UV it. You’re going to create a new model with the new topology that’s heavy. Then you’re going to bring that in the photo scan and project all the photos onto it to create your textures because you can’t project the textures until you have the final asset with UVs. Then you’ll export that texture from photoscan clean it up in Photoshop and then you’ve got your asset. So this is basically the workflow. So the photoscan part. This is the order in which things are done in photoscan. So step one import photos step to mask it. This is an unfortunate part of photoscan but it actually doesn’t take that long. Now that I’ve sort of figured out the workflow for it because if you read the manual it makes it sound like you have to go click click click click click click click click click click click click click click around the object for every single photo and then you want to like shoot yourself in the head because you read that in the manual manual you’re just like whoa that’s going to take forever for 100 photos. The reality is that that’s not true at all at all because I tried to do that on the first one. I was just like this sucks. So I was like what happens if I just go click click click click click around the object and do it super rough. It works totally fine on everything. So you have to create the masks and then once you kind of map what you’re doing is you’re basically telling photoscan in a way what’s important in the image. That’s kind of what the masking process is. I’m interested in this rock. I’m interested in this tree. I’m interested in this part of the cliff face. Then it aligns the photos. So that’s where photoscan starts doing its photogrammetry math. That’s amazing. It figures out where you were standing and figures out 3D space from all of your photos. It creates all these points in space that represent that area. You build what’s called a point cloud. So it’s not polygons yet. It’s not a mesh yet. It’s just dots in 3D space that are colored with the color from the photograph. So it looks like a model that’s textured but it’s really just a point cloud. Then from that you build the geometry which it does. It gives you the super heavy mesh. It has little floaty bits that you have to remove before you go to ZBrush or else Dynamesh is not happy. Which it has a tool for and then you export a model. So here is photoscan. So I imported those photos just using file import and now I’m drawing the mask. Photoscan has a lasso tool. You can see it in the upper left corner is a lasso tool and you can see how quickly I’m making these masks. So it’s just going photo by photo click click click click. And as you look at your photos you’ll have certain photos where I didn’t even need a mask because the object I’m interested in fills the whole frame. Doesn’t need a mask. But then as I get to the side there’s this tree trunk on the right or on the left but I don’t want photoscan to think about. And therefore I’m masking out that area so that only the part that I’m interested in is going to be thought about basically. So the process of making the masks for this cliff face is probably under five minutes or three minutes. This is sped up a little bit. So but it’s still click click click click make mask click click click make mask. Then you go to align photos. I’m using the default options and they’ve worked for every asset I’ve done. It detects the points. It matches them this process always goes fast. This process is always about a minute. So this is a quick part and what you’ll see when it’s done is you have your camera like the photos where you took them and you can see this point cloud. But it’s a very low resolution point cloud. And what you which is why it goes fairly fast and what you do at this point is you just have a bounding box and you just use this little couple tools and top left to rotate and scale the bounding box. You’re just saying this is the region of the point cloud that I want because in your photograph might be like some epic horizon that goes off five miles and there’s going to be a point like way out there. So you’re just making a bounding box around the area like this is what I want you to think about. This is the part of the point cloud that I need. So how long does it take to do this part. This goes really really fast too and then you go to build dense cloud. I’ve been setting it to ultra high for everything that I’ve done and this is where you wait. But not in a recording because I paused it. And so you end up with something that looks like texture geometry but you saw there when I zoomed in it really is dots. It’s dots in 3D space. Let me just go in here for a second and just pause this guy. And so for that how long does that take building the dense point cloud anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour has been what I’ve been getting on my computers. So and so I’m just using an alien where machine but since it does take you know an hour and I had so many assets to process I realized quickly that like all right well it doesn’t take that long and photo scan to like load them make the mask. But it’s going to take an hour so I’m only going to get eight of these done a day. Well that’s kind of a drag. So the solution was having lots of computers. So I was working on five computers for like about six weeks you know just because then it’s just like you’re building the dense cloud and you’re thinking about that and you’re exporting that and that way I could really be cruising and cranking cranking out assets. So once you have the dense point cloud then underneath tools is a tool called build mesh and so from the point cloud is where it’s now going to build a heavy geometry. And so I can see in here that it’s going to build a 8 million poly mesh and I also should point out by the way that when you build a dense point cloud what we’re looking at right there I set it to ultra high so I can get the highest resolution model as possible. That might not matter for what you’re doing. If you’re building low res assets that you know are going to be in the background you wouldn’t set it to ultra high. You could set it to low or medium and it’s going to go way faster. But since I’m trying to build a library that’s flexible I’m trying to build myself a library where I have all sorts of assets that I can use at any time where I need a rock but I wanted to be close to camera that’s OK. It’s a high res asset. That’s why I’m setting it to ultra high. So since I knew I could work on five computers at a time I knew I could set it to ultra high and it would be OK. So you have to figure out really an efficiency there. So then I say build mesh. You can see the dense cloud in the upper left corner is thirty nine million points. And it’s going to give me an eight million poly model. So now I just said OK generating the mesh always takes about a couple of minutes fairly fast and this is what the mesh looks like. So this is now polygons in photos can. And you can see the holes. Which is where that region was missing from my photographs that region just was not in any of the photographs that I took because this was only one row. And I’ll point out in there that something happened. I’m just going to go back a little bit. Let’s go back a little bit more so I can pause. After you build the mesh. There is a tool and photo scan called gradual selection. Because if I zoomed in to this model there are certain areas in there that is going to be a little floating polygons just like a little egg of polygons over here that’s disconnected for the model. You’re going to have a few of them around and if you ignore that and send it to Z brush and dynamic shit to fill the holes then the brush thinks that those little things are important and you get some janky results out of dynamic. So in photo scan this gradual selection tool is there to remove the floating polygons. So you just go to gradual selection pretty much leave it at the fault you’ll see all the floaty bits get highlighted and you hit the delete key and then the floating polygons are gone and you’re safe to go to Z brush and dynamic. So I’m saying OK hit delete and then I can export this model so I go to file save. Or rather export the OBJ. Leave everything at the default for exporting and then export this model. And so the next step obviously is to go to Z brush but here is another example. Here for a tree you can see how rough the mask is and so this is a little bit more detailed than the last one but still the mask process went fast. This is a single row walking around the tree. There is the point cloud now I’m building the high res point cloud. There is your 8 million points this one I didn’t set it to ultra high because I was Camtasia recording for this demo. And sometimes you get floaty bits that you don’t like and the reason is that for trees as it goes up from the trunk now you have little branches and all these leaves. And that’s something that photos can not have much success with little tiny leaves little spider web little things that are up there so sometimes you get this noise. You can build the mesh from this if you want to but it’s easier in photos can’t use the last tool and just last select those points that are floating out and delete them you just select delete key select delete key so that’s what I’m doing in here. So for the ground I’m just cleaning it up so that my ground area is just going to be a nice circle. So just working again on the dense point cloud those areas in there that are white is because like there’s like sky behind that area. Cloudy sky so this process might take 5 minutes it might take 10 minutes. And so areas where I just know the edge is going to be really messy and I’d rather clean that up in Z brush in Maya myself. And then once that’s done short cruise through build the model so here I’m generating the mesh from the dense point cloud. And then you can see the areas that had holes some of them will fill in some of them it won’t and so that’s some of the clean up the land of needing to have to do. Here I did the gradual selection thing to get rid of floaty bits here I’m zooming around trying to see if I can find a floaty bit to show you. And there I found one. And so then just hit the delete key. And once it looks good export the OBJ. And then move on. So here I’m showing the last example for photo scan which is something shot in a studio on a lazy Susan. This is different so when you walk around an object hand holding the mask can be really rough as I just showed you and you get good results. When the camera is not moving and you have something on a lazy Susan with a background that’s blank right it’s just a solid white background behind this thing. Then photo scan is going to have a little bit more difficulty and so it needs a precise mask. I couldn’t tell you the mathematical reasons of why it does but I tested it. This is where the mask matters. You get some messy stuff if you don’t have a precise mask if stuff is shot on the tripod. So but the issue again is making a precise mask that perfectly goes around the object you don’t want to do by hand. So what you want to do is when you shoot your first row of photos of an object you then remove the object right and shoot the black bank blank background. So that you have a photo of what the background is behind that object without the object and then you give that to photo scan and say hey this is the background. So that it can do a difference and so since photo scan can then do a difference between all of your images that have this log and this blank shot of the background without it. Photo scan can make all the masks for you. And then it goes very quickly. So that’s what’s happening inside here so you can see that here is the row for this log and here is a photo that’s blank right there. And I have one for each row. So I’m selecting that row and saying import mask. And so on my hard drive I have the background photo for each row in a folder. And so I’m going to the import mask tool in photo scan saying method from background and telling it what the file name is of that mask that’s on disk. There it is on disk. Selected camera. Go. And now you can see it doing it. And so now you can see it’s made this perfect precise mask around the log. So as I go through the photos I then I’m going to go to the next row. Grab the background image for row two. Generate the masks. And then for some of these you’ll see there’s some clean up there. And so that’s my girlfriend Liz’s hair right there. And so and there’s a log. But if we go back into that. Let me go back to here. Not this one. Let’s go to there. All right. You have to clean that up. But that is really really easy because. Oops. Doesn’t like me pausing the video. Let’s try that again. All right. That is really easy because you’re just going to the last of two and just selecting that area and saying add the mask go to that area add to mask. So it’s basically doing ninety nine percent of the work for me. I just have to go through the photos and just see do any of these need a little bit of cleanup. And then the process is the same aligned photos build dense cloud build model gradual selection export. So this process could be a nightmare but photo scan luckily has that import mask tool. So just remember if you want to shoot on a tripod it’s awesome. Just don’t make the masks manually. So as it goes through let’s just go and skip through some of that a little bit more clean up where I’m zooming in. Doing it for all the rows. And then there is the low res point cloud for that log. And there’s the geometry. So to me I was insanely impressed that for this log with bark that’s peeling off of it that photos can was able to make that model. It’s crazy. It’s super cool. And so ultimately there is a render of it. So that’s after photos can to Z brush clean up my retop it you via project textures get into my render it would be right. But it’s an amazing asset. Right. But the thing is like I didn’t make it like a tree grew and died and dropped it. So but now I have it as an asset. And so since that’s how I got it I don’t mind just taking this asset and like throwing it on the floor in the corner of the scene. If I had modeled that and sculpted that and textured up my happy like in love with that thing. Right. So like and you and all of a sudden like this is going to be in the foreground of the next image that I do. So that’s another thing that’s cool is to just have like these super super nice assets that you can use and populate a scene with. So after photos can you then do you need to clean this up. And so now we’re moving into that phase of the process. And so the first thing I do is I go to Z brush and Z brush you need to import the OBJ and follow these steps. So I’m going to show you images that illustrate this but this is just like the general Z brush workflow. So import OBJ duplicate subtool you need the original to stick around because you’re going to use it for a projection. The high res scan because these ultimately are scans. They’re just scans from photos converted dynamesh to fill holes because dynamesh automatically fills holes and things which is very useful. But then dynamesh has really messy topology. So then Z remesh it to get clean topology. Adjust the topology if I need to subdivide my new model up to the polygon count of the scan. Do a project so all of the higher frequency details from the scan go on to my retopologized model and then add detail to areas that had holes using alphas. And at that point I’m ready to get out of Z brush. So what I have here is the OBJ model for this asset from photo scan. And it’s about four million polygons if I look up there. And so with that I’ll then duplicate it and on the duplicate of that so a duplicate subtool I’ll go to Z remesh and remesh it. I can’t go straight to dynamesh even though I wish I could. But the reason I can’t go straight to dynamesh is because dynamesh can fill holes but it doesn’t like flat objects very much like an open edge object. And it’s going to try and close it in on itself and you kind of get some wacky geometry. So what I do is I first Z remesh it not because I’m trying to get good topology so much. I’m just trying to get this thing to be something where I can guide dynamesh on what to do later. So I Z remesh it now it’s only 40,000 polys. I really quickly jump over to Maya and use the bridge tool to fill these holes because these will guide dynamesh. That way when dynamesh fills the holes I know it’s going to fill the hole the way I want to by just putting these little strips in certain areas which I found to be really helpful. And I take the edge loop around the whole thing by just double clicking on it selects the whole edge loop and just extrude that out. And the reason I extruded out is that when I use dynamesh and fills the holes it’s going to fill the back and not go in on itself. But this process is just jump to Maya bridge bridge bridge bridge bridge bridge extrude that out back to Z brush. So now I’m in Z brush with the model that I adjusted in Maya and you can see the little strips. And now I can go to dynamesh and dynamesh then fills all those holes. Then I can Z remesh. So now I’ve Z remeshed where I now have a clean order topology. The topology is following the curvature changes of the model and thank God for Z remesher. Seriously. I mean I’m sure a lot of you have that feeling. It really is for this awesome. And so the polygon count that I Z remesh that is going to be a subjective thing that depends on where you’re going to use your asset. Since I’m doing high res renders and V-Ray where I’m doing like stills for personal stuff I don’t really care about polygon count too much. So I’m OK making this asset 30,000 polygons right for this asset. If you’re working in a game obviously you may need it to be lower but that’s just going to be how you’re going to adjust the way you read apologizes thing. So then now that I have it I just jump to Maya real quick and delete the back half that I don’t need because they did extrude this thing out and dynamesh filled that hole in the back of this thing. And I just want to get rid of that and the fastest way to me to do it is just to do it in Maya. So I just delete the back half. Bring that back into Z brush and then turn on the sub tool that I kept around of the original scan. So now that’s what I’m seeing. So I have the scan from photo scan visible as a sub tool as well as this new piece of geometry that I dynamesh and Z remesh. I then have to subdivide my new piece of geometry to be roughly the same number of polygons as the scan so that I can use the project button in Z brush where it projects all of the detail from the scan onto my new model that has good topology and all the holes are filled. Which is then that. So what we’re now looking at basically looks exactly like the scan it just now has the topology that I need. Which is great. And so this workflow is very linear. It’s very straightforward. And so it’s basically do this this this this this this all right next rock this this this this this is pretty much a very linear straightforward workflow. But for the holes like up there zooming in on it. When you use project in Z brush sometimes you do get little janky things like up there it’s like all these little like wacked out little polygons. So and the edge of this looks a little rough so I just grabbed the smooth tool or the smooth brush and Z brush and I just smooth out that area. But I now need to add detail to you because again it was a hole. So how do I get the detail in that area. Well I don’t want to sculpt because that’s slow. And so what I want to do is use Alphas. I have a big library of Alphas that I’ve made from scans. And so because what’s rad is that I can have this model of this cliff face or of this rock or whatever in Z brush I can make my canvas 2K by 2K. Put that rock with face whatever fill the canvas and just grab dock. And now I have the depth information of that asset and that is now a 16 bit gray scale. How far. And so I built myself a big library of 16 bit gray scale PSD from doing grab dock and Z brush off of these rocks and cliffs and tree trunks and things that I’ve been making to create a big Alfa library. So it’s useful about that is I can then go to the standard brush with the drag rectangle tool grab these Alphas mask this area and just drag some Alphas on it. And so and since all of these Alphas are coming from scans they look good. They look really good. And what I found to work really well is to grab dock off of this asset. Right. So if I go somewhere else on the asset pick an angle grab dock create an Alfa go to the area with a hole is and use that Alfa to fill detail in the hole it matches because the detail is in the same form language as that Alfa has. Right. So I’ve done that on a lot of tree trunks because there’s so many different types of bark but I go to another part of the tree. It’s the same kind of bark grab dock. Now I have a perfect bark Alfa for that area that I need to fill a hole in. And so now I filled in the holes so here in the end what I have is I have a 19000 polygon version of this asset where I’m happy with the topology it’s fine. I have the four and a half or five million poly version of it with the order topology. So this is the one. This is the five. So at level five it looks like the scan as to one that’s my base mesh and then what I do from there depends on your workflow. If I’m working in V-Ray I might export a displacement map that represents the difference between the two. If you’re in games you’ll use a normal map. Sometimes I use displacements and normals but that is the next step. But before I can make a displacement map or a normal map I need my UV is to be laid out. So I use Hedis UV layout. Maya’s UV tools have gotten a lot better but I started using Hedis a long time ago and I still find it to be super easy. So I lay out the UVs relatively quickly and then now I have my model and I can create the normal map. And so the normal map I create an X normal. So that means that if I’m creating a displacement map as you all would know 32 bit displacement export from Z brush. If it’s a normal map I export the SD1 which is 19,000 polys for this asset. I export the SD5 which is five million polys. So I have the low res mesh and the high res mesh. Save those to disk. Go to X normal and it gives me an awesome normal map which is the difference between the low and the high. So those of you who have used X normal know what I’m talking about. Those of you who have tried to use Z brush to make normal maps know that they’re a little soft. So Z brush normal maps aren’t awesome but X normal is free and it’s really cool. So I’ve got that. So this is X normal. If you haven’t seen it it’s free. It’s a very straightforward tool to use. You just say here’s my high res here’s my low res give me a normal map and that’s it processing a normal map right there. And so now I have my new model from Z brush that’s been cleaned up. It’s been UV’d but now I need to project the photos onto that object to get my texture map because that’s still a process we haven’t done yet. So I export from Z brush the UV’d high res model and I import that into photo scan. And so the model that photo scan made is still in photo scan. You got to delete it. Bring your new one in from Z brush. That’s your final asset. And then project the photos where I swap the images in photo scan to the ones that are deleted where I adjusted the exposure settings. And then you got to clean it up and I’ll explain that later because that probably makes no sense right now. So this is me and photo scan. There’s the model photo scan made. I go to remove model right click. Then I go to import and I import the mesh that I exported from Z brush the high res mesh that’s going to come in. It’ll pop in at the exact same spot as long as I didn’t move it in Z brush which I don’t do. And then once it’s in there all you need to do is project the photos. So workflow build texture keep UV. And for me I set it to 8K. So even though I know that the photo or this texture I’m going to get ultimately at 8K might be a little soft I still like to do it at 8K and then I can resize it to 4K in Photoshop and it’s going to be really really sharp. So keep UV texture size 8192 by 8192. This process goes very fast. Usually takes about a minute. And then up at the top here you have display modes and photo scan so like you know wire frame shaded. This one is shaded with textures. So I’m just clicking on that and there it is. So now I’m seeing my model with a texture. So it’s just amazing that photo scan is projecting all of these photos together and blending them all together and giving you a texture map. So areas that had holes the texture is going to be black. But that as you know is fairly straightforward stuff to clean up in Photoshop with the clone tool. So I’m going to tools export texture exporting that to the right spot as an 8K texture exporting it as a TIFF. Sort of scrub through that. Save it out. Jump over to Photoshop. Load it in and that’s what you get when you load it into Photoshop. But that’s actually not what you want. And so this became a sticking point for a little while like that’s weird like as far as like no edge blending even though the manual talks about edge blending and so it’s sort of like bleeding rather bleeding the edges out on the UV shells. What you get when you load the TIFF and I tried all the file formats and I googled like crazy. And you load this TIFF file into Photoshop and it looks like all you have is a layer with transparency. So and somebody maybe has an alternate approach to this which you do. I’d be really happy to hear. But the workflow in the end that I was not able to figure out in Photoshop for some mysterious reason I still don’t understand how to get the edge bleed information that photo scan does generate in here. And so the solution weirdly is to actually because you can see there’s no alpha channel or anything like that where that information seems to be hiding. But if you open that image in Exyn view which is a free image viewer. And so I just you know I exyn view is what I use anyway as an image viewer. So I tried loading the image into Exyn view just to see what it looked like and look the same way. But then in Exyn view you can go and say under the view menu. I’m about to move it so you can see it. If you go to the view menu and turn off use alpha channel. That’s what you want. And so you can see that photo scan actually does bleed the edges out. And so that is important because when you put this on especially if you have multiple UV shells based on how you lay the UV out you’re going to get little scenes without the edge bleeding. And so point being is photo scan does give you your UV shells with the bleed in there. I just can’t figure out how to get Photoshop to read the damn thing. So I go to Exyn normal or to Ex normal not sorry Exyn view sound the same. Turn off the alpha channel re export it as a TIFF and then load that TIFF into Photoshop. And then there you go. So now I have the texture from photo scan and it’s ready to clean up. And ultimately when you look at it the obvious thing is that area was getting sunlight. So that’s obviously the area that I’m going to go in and clean up. And this process is straightforward texture stuff as far as using the clone tool looking for areas that have a little blur. I still have the alpha channel in there that I can use as reference of where I have clean up to do. But with natural things like tree bark and rocks and ground and dirt and mud. I found that I can be really really sloppy with the clone tool when I’m trying to clean these things up. And so ultimately it’s a matter of going in and just going all over the place with the clone tool. So this is everything that we just did. Clone into the shadows cloned into sunlight areas. And so the next little video we’re going to be doing that. So I’m going to make a new layer. Grab the clone tool pick a random area and just clone. So you can be as anal with this as you want. You could use other photos that you have from the shoot that you’re going to go and clone from. But with the number of assets that I was creating I didn’t really want to be too anal about it. So what I find is like I prefer to be really sloppy with this kind of stuff and bang it out. And then down the road when I do actually use this asset and an image I can place it in the set where I need to do my render for my final thing and I mean every notice that that needs any work or at that point I can decide I need to clean up the texture on that thing a little bit more. So here’s the same thing for a tree. We go back a little bit so you can see for the tree. This is what the texture looked like from photo scan so you can see the tree trunk bits that are going up high into the leaves. We’re getting really really black and missing information because they’re above me. And so photo scan wasn’t able to see the top of the tree branches that are up there. So that’s something that definitely needed some cleanup. So new layer clone tool and just real quick clone into those areas. Now since I’m fixing it in Photoshop and cloning over the edges of the UV shell clearly there’ll be a seam. But again like what I said before I don’t care about the seam because nobody may ever notice it. And if I do notice it in an image down the road I’ll just fix it in Mari. So here’s something that was shot in sunlight but I thought it was cool so I wanted to shoot it anyway. So this is how I just approach cleaning that up. Let me go back a second. I take the image that has shadows. I make a grayscale. I bump the contrast up so I can isolate the shadows and I use this as a mask. So now that I have that as a mask I can save it as an alpha channel and load it as a selection. Once I have that as a selection I can grow the selection out a little bit using the grow selection tool in Photoshop. Test it. So it tests that when I paint into it I’m just painting where the shadows are. And then I’m just expanding it so select, modify, expand that selection. And once it looks like that mask that’s isolating the shadows is working pretty well I then just go crazy with the clone tool. And then just start cloning, cloning, cloning. Just being random about it. And in the end it’s actually a pretty fast way to flatten the lighting on that thing. It’s sloppy but it does work. And so there’s another object that I did the same thing. So once you have your textures then you set up the model material in Maya or VRay. So import the base mesh into Maya, set up your lighting, set up your materials, render the image, add it to a library. I have a new asset and export the model by itself to use down the road. So that is pretty much the photogrammetry part of things. So what we’re going to do going forward is I’m just going to talk about getting into Maya, using these assets and organizing them. And then I have the image that I showed earlier where I’m just going to show a kind of like sort of step by step sort of how that came together. So that’s kind of where we’re at. And so in Maya I just load in the texture that I made from Photoscan, loaded my normal map from X normal, make a simple VRay material and physical sun and sky and do a render. And then once I have that render I can just go and adjust the settings on my VRay material to get this to look like the kind of rock or stone that I wanted to have. I know that generally I just want my glossiness to be like around 0.25 to 0.4. There’s no right answer. There is no right answer for what the glossiness is for stone because there’s so many different types of minerals and stones and rocks that have the whole gamut in regards to glossiness. So it’s personal preference really. How shiny do you want this rock to be? So I just give it a ballpark area because I’m building an asset for my library right now. So at least it has the VRay material that’s kind of blocked out to be a stone material so that when I save this asset to my library by itself I know that down the road I can import this into any project that has the VRay material. It’s got its normal map, it’s got its texture and it’s ready to set dress another scene. Also when I create my assets in their scenes by themselves to set up the materials I do work at real world scale. So this little stick that I have is 180 centimeters tall so roughly the height of a person. So by making my entire library at the same scale that basically means that if I always work at the same scale I know that when I am working and I want I need a tree and I import a tree it’s going to come in at the right size. I need a rock it’s come in at the size that that rock was that I thought it needed to be. I might scale rocks up and down a bit but it just makes my life easier to know that everything is consistent. So once I have that asset and it seems to be good I will save this render to my images directory for my project. I have a project directory for Maya called photogrammetry in that scenes directory are all my photogrammetry assets that I build in the Maya files for them in the images directory. I have renders of them where the render is the name of the scene file so that I can browse my image directory for this Maya project and see all my photographic parameter assets and be like I want that cliff and then file import the scene file for that which is called ladder Canyon cliff be alone. So that means the only thing in that scene file is the model with its material and textures. So building a library is useless if you’re not organized right. You’re never going to you don’t want to be like I need a spring three years ago I modeled a spring. What project was that for and then start digging through your Maya projects to try and find that thing because that really going to slow you down. So taking the time to be organized is a time consuming thing to do but ultimately it saves you so much time down the road. So I’m very annually organized with my naming conventions for my library so I have a Maya project called speech tree a Maya project called onyx a Maya project called world machine a Maya project called photogrammetry and so forth so that I know that’s where those assets are and where the images are and where the scene files are. So this is the images directory for my photogrammetry project and so in here you can see that I just have renders of these different elements. So they can easily import them into another scene later so just all sorts of different cliff faces logs rocks and so forth skull trees. And so with all of these things I’m also showing you speech tree folder all the renders of my items by themselves ready to import into other scenes and so forth. And what I’m showing here is what my Maya scenes directory looks like. So here would be cliff Indian Canyon B. That’s the Maya file that has physical sky and lighting and I’m blocking out the shader and the materials and making sure it looks right and doing render tests underneath that I have cliff Indian Canyon B alone. So I selected that model file export export that model to disk by itself so I could just import it later because you don’t want to import the one that has the lights in it because then every time you import an asset now these lights are coming in and all the stuff that you don’t want that are gonna screw your scene up. So we’ve kind of gone through that whole process of photogrammetry photoscan Z brush cleaning stuff up. I know it’s a lot of information but again this is being recorded so you guys can scan through it later if you’re interested. But now we’re going to move on to that image I showed earlier and talk about layout and then you’ll see how these photogrammetry assets kind of got used. So for this the first thing that I think about if I’m going to do a personal piece just to sort of keep things simple is what aspect ratio don’t I want to work out. What’s my composition going to be where’s my camera going to be and I block out things really really easily and simply and so the image that I showed earlier was something where I actually literally just had this photogrammetry asset in Maya. And it’s just like I’m going to make an image with this somehow. So I’m just going to use this asset to try and come up with an image that ideally will be kind of inspired by ladder Canyon and Titus Canyon was kind of the hope. And so I took that model I rotated it created a physical sun in camera adjusted the light position and did a render. And so this ultimately told me like I’m going to try and make a Titus Canyon type kind of ravine thing that goes off into the distance. I’m going to have cliff walls on either side so I kind of knew that’s where I was going. And so ultimately this one photogrammetry asset I then sort of built an image off of. And so what I’m showing here is something that’s important to remember is that these assets you create whether it’s a cliff face or a rock or whatever you’re welcome to tweak it however you want. So here I’m putting a lattice on it. Grabbing some lattice points and I’m just going to adjust the shape on it. I could use like a bend deformer a twist deformer and so forth any kind of deformers to adjust these things so I could have a flat cliff wall put a twist deformer and turn it into a cylinder. Have it turn a corner model it more and adjusted in Z brush because when I put it to the left of frame I just wasn’t happy for whatever reason about what how the angle was going and I wanted to adjust that. So here what I’m showing is like with the lattice and without the lattice. So without the lattice look like that with the lattice. I ended up just sort of moving it out of frame. So I’m just selecting the lattice and turning it on. So just a simple lattice adjustment lattices are super useful in Maya as modeling tools and then that’s the second lattice I put on top of it just to get it to flow with the composition better. Which is all very subjective and then I decided to add some other objects so I made a decision to work at 50 percent scale can remember why but basically inside here I remember that that was something where I can remember why. At real world scale based on wanting to have a canyon that goes off to the distance where we’re going to see some little mountain thing that’s maybe like a mile or two miles or 10 miles away. If you’re my scenes if you work at real world scale get too big viewport bugs out you start getting weird artifacts in viewport if you’re seeing is just too large in real world scale and that bugs me. And so if I work at 50 percent scale I know my scene won’t be as big. I ideally won’t get open jail artifacts and so if I just make a decision that I’m going to work at 50 percent scale that whenever I open assets from my library I know just open it up and scale to 50 percent open to scale open it up and scale to 50 percent. So and then I started blocking out some simple shapes as they work on composition. So something that a lot of people forget is that before Z brush you did have sculpting in Maya which sucks compared to Z brush but you can do it and so I do it all the time. So I made a plane subdivided to 100 by 100. And then with that plane in here I can use the sculpt geometry tool. And so going to polygons mesh sculpt geometry you can push out push push in adjust the brush radius hold down the B hot key to change the size and then in Maya I’m sculpting the reason sculpting in Maya is useful is because again I started by figuring out my aspect ratio. My camera position. I need to work the camera and you can’t do that in Z brush. Z brush does not have a true 3D camera and so since I’m my final rendering is going to be in Maya from V-Ray it’s just a lot easier to block things out in Maya that way. So I’m making something that ultimately looks like this blobby thing but I know that I’m going to then bring it to World Machine bring it to Z brush detail it later. So I’m really just focusing on composition. Where are things simple things that I can make very very quickly. And so that way you’re focusing on really what will have much more of an important effect on the quality of the image at the end then how well something is Z brush or how detailed something is as far as texture. So here you can see these really really simple objects that are inside there. All made in Maya with the sculpt geometry tool so that what I end up with in my shot camera you know is pretty much what the image is going to end up looking like. But my time investment is only maybe an hour or 40 minutes or whatever time it takes to just block out cubes cylinders spheres this is a boulder this is a simple thing with the sculpt geometry tool. And then I can start detailing all that stuff. So here is an initial World Machine pass on the far geometry. So I just took that sent it over to World Machine and detailed it. And what I’m showing you is the way to do that. So if you’ve used World Machine you know that it’s a tool for basically creating height maps or displacement maps. So imagine World Machine everything is a plane you use procedural fractals Perlin all that kind of stuff and you create these terrain shapes but it’s all off of a flat plane and what you export from World Machine is a grayscale image. Right which is a displacement map to create a train. That’s basically what you’re doing. So the issue is like well then how do I sculpt that in Maya but still be able to go to Z brush because you can’t import geometry into World Machine work on it. But what I can do is take that mesh that I made in Maya bring it into Z brush look straight down on it with no perspective orthographically and grab doc. Because that then grabs the height information of what I sculpted in Maya and then I can take that grayscale image that’s the height information of that thing that I made in Maya and send that to World Machine. And then put the erosion node on it and have something that looks amazing just because of the erosion node. So in here through a texture on that thing adjusted the light angle put some shadow objects off camera because I wanted this area to be in shadow. So here I’m selecting some objects. Let’s see which one this is. Give me a second just to be like where are we going. Yeah what I’m showing here now is based on the previous slide saying things that are off camera. This is a really important thing to actually point out. My camera is down there looking this way but I have all the stuff that’s behind camera. Very often I see you know with students scenes that they’re only focusing on what’s in front of the camera but not what’s outside a frame behind. Now that we’re using global illumination renders pretty much everybody then your objects are based so much on reflectivity that what’s behind camera is extremely important to the lighting that you get of what’s in front of the camera. And so if I don’t want it to look like there’s bright sky behind the camera flooding this canyon with light I need to put some cliffs and trees and things behind the camera to block that light from being visible in the reflections. So that’s what that stuff is inside there. So there’s my scene all looks pretty straightforward. Zoom forward. So now that I’ve added another piece of geometry there with the sculpt geometry tool added another one. So it’s starting to look pretty much like what the overall layout of the final images did some in the lower right corner. And then I did a world machine pass on that piece. And then a Z brush pass on this piece. Z brush pass on the ground in there. Added some cavity maps on those pieces. Z brush pass on this guy on the right. And you will notice that I am breaking the scene into pieces. That’s very intentional because I know if I do the whole thing is a single piece of geometry. I’m going to have polygon issues in the brush. I’m going to want to subdivide this thing more and I’m not going to be able to because it’s going to become 200 million polys and it’s a drag. So by working in Maya 2 camera it makes it easier for me to block and cut this thing up into pieces based on how much I think I’m going to have to subdivide it in Z brush. Here I made an adjustment on the upper right corner using a lattice for whatever reason. Z brush pass on this boulder right there. Z brush pass on the ground. And now I’m going to show the Z brush thing of making those alphas. If you want to make an alpha from what you have with a piece of geometry in Z brush. The first thing is there’s no reason for your alphas to be bigger than 2K. A 2K alpha 2000 by 2000 pixels is 4 million points of information. Right. So if you had a plane in Z brush and you subdivided it to 4 million polys and you took a 2K alpha and dragged it over the entire thing it would be clean. Right. So you have to be thinking how much surface area am I going to drag this alpha out over and that tells you what the resolution of your alpha should be. But if your alphas are higher res than 2K they’re going to get slow in Z brush. So I make my canvas size 2K. I did a grab doc. Right there you can see the grayscale height information from what was on canvas. Then with the standard brush I’m switching to drag rectangle and dragging that out to have an alpha. And then I can go and use radial fall off here just to show that it can fall off. Now I really don’t like radial fall off because it’s too perfect and round looking. So what I end up actually doing for my library is I take all of these alphas that I’m doing from grab doc bringing them to Photoshop as 16 bit and just grab a black brush and paint the edges out to be non perfectly round. But it still fades at the edges. So here I’ve got this object spinning it around. Zoom in find an area that I think could make a cool alpha. And then grab doc. I have another grayscale 16 bit image that I can then switch over to this plane subtool. And with drag rectangle test it out. And something that’s a very very useful tip. I got to take this off because I’m boiling is if you use drag rectangle with a 2K alpha it might seem slow. Go to the stroke palette and turn off lazy mouse. Lazy mouse has no purpose with drag rectangle whatsoever but for some mysterious reason it’s on by default when you use drag rectangle and the performance hit is massive. Because if you have like a 5 million or 20 million probably model and a 2K alpha and the drag rectangle tool and you try and drag it out it’s going to chug. Turn off lazy mouse. It’ll be real time. So just any time you use drag rectangle in Z brush turn off lazy mouse. It really makes a big big performance jump. So here I’m dragging that out and then I can see just like how simply I can start creating really cool alphas. So here what I’m showing is the grab docs that I’ve done off of like rocks and stuff like that. But they don’t fade at the edges and so here I’m showing a folder called Cliffs fall off. So each one of these I opened in Photoshop and just painted the edges to black because again radial fall off looks funny. So if all of your alphas have a round fall off and you start dragging them off it looks really hilly and doesn’t look really nice. And so by taking the time to modify my alpha library you get much much better results. So I also put all of my alphas in the directory where Z brush is installed so that when I use spotlight in Z brush I can access them very very quickly. So going to light box you can see that if I go to my alpha tab right there in light box you can see I have bark, Cliffs, World Machine, scan data, alphas and so forth. So I can double click on one of those and have very very quick access to a bunch of alphas. These are alphas that I made with a plugin for Photoshop called Filter Forge which is awesome. And so I just have lots and lots of alphas that are all pretty organized. Another thing that you can do which I did right there which I do a lot as well is that if you go to the light box folder in the Z brush installation directory and that’s where you put your alphas. You have to use light box, browse, double click on one to load it in. Didn’t load in. Double click on it. Didn’t load in. Double click on it. It’s like this weird thing with spotlight that it doesn’t always load when you double click. It’s kind of annoying. So what I like to do is go to the Z startup directory, put the alphas there and restart Z brush. So if I know I’m going to be using these 10 alphas or these 20 alphas or these 50 alphas I’m going to use all of my Cliffs scan data alphas in this session. Put them in the Z startup directory in the alpha directory, restart Z brush and then when I click on alphas they’re all already loaded. So that I can just go click, grab that alpha. Click, grab that alpha. Click, grab that alpha and work. So I don’t have to go like double click, double click, double click, double click to try and load all these into Z brush. So that’s really, really useful. So there I’m turning off radial fall off. So you can see that ultimately they look better without that radial fall off. You just get something that’s going to blend together across them in a much better way. So here I’m just grabbing random alphas onto that plane. And so that literally in five seconds, because it’s literally that long, it’s like alpha drag, alpha drag, alpha drag, rocky looking floor thing. Which is really cool. So you’re still art directing it. So you still did the scans and made the alphas and decided which area you thought was cool and you still are deciding which one to grab and how to rotate and scale. It’s like you’re still art directing but in the end it’s really, really fast. So do you get credit for how cool that looks? It’s like I don’t know if I do. In a way I do. So but in a way I really don’t. But it’s still super cool and fun and valuable. So here I’m just showing all the different pieces that have been Z brushed and what they end up looking like in Maya. And so we’ll export from Z brush the model that has been worked on. SDIV level, create a normal map and X normal so that it’s ready to render. So this is what the Z brush file looks like for this project. So here I’m just selecting different tools. So if I grab the ground in there, just showing what that looks like. And then here I’m grabbing drag rectangle, going to alpha, grabbing some random alpha. I tend to set the vocal shift to a negative value to get less of a bump, have it be more flat. And then I can just adjust my Z intensity and just start dragging that in different areas to create rocky forms. So like a tablet was not used in the making of this image at all, right? Because when using drag rectangle you don’t really need a tablet. It’s really just the mouse and dragging and that’s fine. So it’s really not sculpting. Just showing different pieces. So I’m only sculpting on the part of that that’s visible to camera. And then here is another example scene. So this is a different image, one that I showed earlier. And for this one, I have to go forward for that to play. This is what I made in Maya. So like anybody could make that very quickly. It’s just some flat planes with a sculpt geometry tool. So it’s all about camera composition, pick a lens, where’s the camera and make simple shapes. And so making those really doesn’t take long. Breaking into different pieces so I’ll have good polygon count in Maya or in ZBrush. And really taking the time in Maya to like is this the composition I want? Is this where I want things to sit in frame before I go to ZBrush? And it’s a fast process. So that when I go to ZBrush what I have is very simple looking. But then by grabbing all those alphas that I’ve made in my library, I can then just drag them onto these surfaces. And ultimately get pretty natural looking rocky forms pretty fast. So if I look at any one of these shapes inside here and like thought about like how long would it take me to sculpt that with like standard brush. Standard, pinch, damn standard, whatever. It’s like that would be like an epic sculpting session where I would just, you know, it would be very time consuming. Cuz you know it’s something that is fine and sometimes you’ll have no choice but to do that if you have very specific art direction. You’re not gonna just be able to go scan it. But for something like this it works really well. And so that’s what the Maya file looks like. For this one I was lazy and used decimation master. So you can see they’re super heavy. Just some extra geometry outside of frame to make sure I don’t have too many bright sky reflections coming into the front of the image. A tree that I made in Speedtree. Some random rocks that I placed which are photogrammetry rocks. And then physical sun and sky with V-Ray. And then a little bit of, you know, color tweaking and adjusting levels and stuff in Photoshop. So back to this guy. Texturing materials, V-Ray materials, textures. I do use CG textures sometimes if some things aren’t photogrammetry based. Meaning this guy on the left is from a photo scan, right? It has a texture. This stuff I made in ZBrush. It doesn’t have a texture. So for that I might use textures from photogrammetry stuff but not so much cuz they’re not really set up to be tiled. So ultimately CG textures is awesome. Like I have tons of great rock and cliff textures that are tileable from there. And so I tend to build tileable shader networks so that I really can sort of load in a library of cliff, rock and boulder shaders that are already set up and set to be tileable. And then I can just adjust the repeats on a shared 2D placement node across all the textures to adjust how the scale is working. So these are some textures from cgtextures.com. Which I think they just renamed it textures.com. And they’re tileable. And another thing that I’ve been using a lot lately is Megascans, which is coming from Quixel. It’s a library of tileable 4K, 8K, unbelievable quality textures that have the normal map, translucent maps, gloss maps, AO maps and everything for all of these photogrammetry acquired textures. And Megascans is awesome. So this is what Megascans looks like. So this is what the website looks like. These are textures from the Megascans library that I downloaded off the website. And so these are preview renders that they give you for the textures. And they’re really, really cool. And so for any of them, if I go into the folder, you can see they have the normal, they have the diffuse. And these are all really, really easy to use. And it’s just awesome that they’re 4K and tileable. So for rocky things, cliffs, landscapes, I’ve been using these a lot. So let’s cruise through there. You can just showing a lot of variety of Megascans. And again, that’s from Quixel, the guys who make Endo and Nito. So end up with a bunch of materials. Like I said, tile textures to block things out. Blended V-Ray materials using snow as a slope mask. That’s a really good Maya trick. The snow procedural is a slope angle mask. So with V-Ray blend materials, I can create a snow shader and make it black and white. And then basically I can just have something where it’s flat, it’s white. Where it’s vertical, it’s black. Have threshold and use that as a mask with a V-Ray blend material. So I can say the tops of my rocks are dusty, but the sides aren’t. Or the tops of the rocks are sandy, but the sides are more rocky. I use the snow procedural to make that blend. So World Machine has slope angle and people think Maya doesn’t, but it does. It’s just called snow. I also paint textures as masks for the blend materials. Now I’m instancing small rocks and boulders. So now I’m set dressing. I have a library of rocks. This is just a test render for my library. And so what I’m showing here is how I populate a scene with that stuff. So there’s a script called SP Paint, which is on Creative Crash. So SP Paint is a free script for Maya. It’s super, super cool. So basically you can just have a library of little rocks like this, or trees, or blades of grass, or whatever it is. Launch the SP Paint script. Select the geometry you wanna paint on. Select my little rocks. Say that that’s the brush geometry. Tell it that I wanna randomize the rotation in X, Y, and Z as I paint. Zoom in and then just start painting. So it’s geometry paint. Super, super useful. So as you use the SP Paint script, it’s randomly selecting from whatever you gave it. So if you gave it 20 rocks, it’s gonna randomly select from those rocks and rotate them. So there’s others ways to randomly place geometry in a scene, but SP Paint is the most precise. You can do particle instancing with particle emission off surfaces. That’s a little bit more fulfilling, very large areas. And so here we can see some of those elements, and you can adjust the scale and the size. And the thing that’s important to note is that the SP Paint script, you can set it to make instance copies. So as you paint, the duplicates that it’s creating aren’t real duplicates, they’re instance copies sharing the same shape node. Meaning that I have no limit on polygon count. So even though these little rocks are maybe 1,000 or 5,000 polygons each, I can just go in there and just paint like a maniac. And just like, I’m at a million polys, I’m at 10 million polys, I’m at 50 million polys, doesn’t matter, it’ll render. So, cuz again, I’ve gone up to 15 billion and it worked, and I haven’t tried going higher than that. So as long as you’re instance copying, you can copy stuff like crazy, which is really, really cool. So eventually OpenGL or your viewport might get a little slow, so I’ll change those objects to bounding box, so that at least I can still tumble and navigate the scene. So now I tweaked that geometry in the background, added a new boulder on the ground. Adjusted this geometry in the background in ZBrush, switched to a 2K render, and have populated some photogrammetry elements. So some boulders, little log, tree trunk on the right. So the cool thing is as I’m now finishing layout on this image and I wanna set dress, I can now go through my library and grab different pieces to put in there. Then just doing a little tweaking in Photoshop as far as color and adding a sky. Using a ZDF pass to add a little bit of fog into the scene. Just plopping a little, googled campfire, grabbed a little campfire image and put that in there, googled smoke, grabbed an image of smoke, plopped that inside there. Some little bushes. Final tweaks decided to add a little bird on the ground. This is all in Photoshop. New texture back there. And then final adjustments to upres this to 4K. 3840 by 2160, that’s the resolution of 4K TVs. And so 4K TVs now are that resolution, so that’s kind of my new. I used to do a lot of things at 1920 by 1080 targeting HD. And now that we have 4K TVs coming around, this is the new resolution that I’m trying to target. Because it’s great for displaying images on screens. So we have a new space upstairs that has a 4K screen on the wall. And so I can just put 4K images like this on a USB stick and put it in the TV and then it slideshows through 4K images. But they’re really cool because on a 4K TV looking at images, it’s crazy. You can just get really close to it and it’s rad. So the compositing workflow is all Photoshop and After Effects based. So you have all your passes from V-Ray, typical passes. Color ID or material ID pass just so I can isolate certain things in Photoshop if I need to. Z-depth pass for fog and depth of field. Import those into Photoshop. Composite them the way they’re supposed to be composited so that what I end up with is an image. Here’s different masks to select elements. But the idea is that I end up with the image as it looks in V-Ray but in Photoshop with all of the passes so I can then just start making my adjustments. So what I’m seeing here is this is what the image looked like out of V-Ray. But this is the final image. And so something that really for personal work and especially when you’re doing stills but really ultimately everything tends to get composited. 100% of things in visual effects are composited and most of that work is color graded and goes through the eye to tweak. So I know this process of doing this has become much more prevalent lately online. So a lot more people are talking about it so you’re probably all very aware of it. But it’s just something that really only try and get your image 80% of the way there with V-Ray or your rendering engine. Cuz it’ll be so much easier once you get into Nuke or Photoshop to make all those final little tweaks. So here is what it looks like from V-Ray which is kind of not too exciting. But then with a few tweaks in Photoshop with levels adjustments and curves and so forth. I was able to make it more the way I wanted it to look. So you can see I’ve got a whole bunch of layers just adding in different elements. But if you go through it to see what I did in Photoshop, diffuse, levels adjustment on the background, darkening the foreground, doing a texture overlay on the cliff on the left cuz I didn’t like the texture, that’s what I overlaid. Warming it, levels adjustment, darkening the cliff on the right, adjusting HSV, levels adjustment on the mid ground. All subtle subjective things, but they go really fast because you’re doing it in Maya. If I wanted to go and do it in V-Ray, I’d be like, I want that rock to be a little darker. I’m gonna go to the texture in Photoshop and make the texture darker and save that to disk and then go to my material in V-Ray and reload that texture and then re-render because I wanted that dark rock to be a little darker. For stills it’s so much easier to cheat. Grabbing an image of clouds from a photograph that I took of clouds. I have a lot of cloud photos. Levels adjustment, adding some smoke that’s added for the campfire. Flatten, convert to 16 bit, export to After Effects for Magic Bullet. Magic Bullet I mentioned earlier is a color grading plugin for After Effects, but it only works in 16 bit, not 32. So go into After Effects, load my image in. This is what Magic Bullet looks like. It’s basically Instagram filters. But it has tons of them and they’re super easy to adjust because each one, you can see all the nodes that were used to create it and drag more nodes in. And so it’s a non-destructive color grading tool, but it’s really, really awesome. So this huge library that it has of looks, right? You can also download more online or great starting points to then make adjustments to your images. So there’s two different looks, another look. So I grab one that I like, make some adjustments, export it. Back in Photoshop for final adjustments. Here I just added a texture on the background right there. Made it a little bit brighter on the right there. Super subtle things. Decided I wanted the rock on the left to be brighter. Adding some texture overlays on the ground. Bushes and fog. Added another bush right over there. Bird. Signature. And then an image. And so that’s pretty much the process of what went through for this. And so again, I had an asset block out simple shapes, detail them in ZBrush. Use a texture library to block the textures out so that ultimately the process of making natural environments goes very, very quickly. And so the photogrammetry part of this was about making more assets to my library. My library was missing something. Really cool logs, really cool tree trunks, really cool rocks. Learn photogrammetry, learn photoscan. Spent like six weeks just building a library. Now I have that library that I can use for years to come. And so it’s super, super cool process to do. Ultimately once you learn photogrammetry and photoscan and how to use the camera, the process to me is kind of like UVs now. Like I used to hate UVs, now I don’t hate UVing. And now UVing is kind of like this zen thing where you can just put music on and just UV. So adding things to my library is that way sometimes. I don’t feel like coming up with an image, maybe I’m just going to add to my library today. It’s a Sunday and I’m going to make some rocks. And it’s time well spent because you might use that later. And so here just showing the difference between again the V-Ray render and the final render. And that’s what we’ve gone through. So photoscan, ZBrush, Maya, ZBrush, World Machine, materials, compositing, and grading. So a lot of different steps. These are the tools. So camera, tripod, Lazy Susan, Amazon, Paul C Buff, Einstein’s strobes. You have to order that stuff from Paul C Buff. Pocket wizards are BH Photo, Westcott soft boxes, BH Photo, seamless backdrop, Castex, which is right there. C stands, BH Photo or Sammy’s. And then these are the tools. So Lightroom to organize the photos. Photoscan to do your processing. ZBrush to clean up and retopo and fill holes. UV layout to UV. X normal to get your normal maps. XN view to get the edge bleed on the UV shells. Maya as the main hub, V-Ray for rendering these days. Photoshop and After Effects for compositing, even though I should use Nuke. And Magic Bullet, because it’s pretty easy to use. That’s it. >> [APPLAUSE] >> Thanks. So I guess, do we have time for questions? >> Questions, yeah, we have about 15 minutes, if that’s okay? >> Sure, okay. >> That was amazing, by the way. Thank you. >> Thank you. >> So much detail. [LAUGH] Okay, first question. >> The list of tools, some of these I haven’t heard of before. Do they have training free versions to learn on or anything? >> As far as these, well Lightroom, you can get as part of the Adobe Creative Suite and get a subscription for that. Photoscan is kind of pricey. And so I’m not sure if they have a student version. That is the one thing about Photoscan that I guess would be a negative is that it’s, I forget the precise price, but it’s like $1,000 or something like that. But ultimately, if you’re a studio and you’re thinking of how much time and hardest time you’re saving by building these libraries, then it pays for itself pretty fast. UV layout take 100 bucks, Maya’s Maya, V-rays, V-rays. So Magic Bullet is not that expensive. It’s like a couple hundred dollars. >> What about the texturing libraries? Some of those, are those? >> CG Textures is like a monthly subscription. I forget what it is. I’ve had a subscription to that for so long. It’s like ten bucks a month maybe. Megascans, they keep saying it’s about to come out. They’ve been saying that for two years. >> [LAUGH] >> I’m not sure what the pricing will be for Megascans. It’s really cool though. I assume it’ll be something affordable, I hope. Like meaning a monthly subscription, I don’t know. >> Excellent, thanks. >> Okay. >> Next question, I’ll go to this one first. >> I was gonna ask, have you ever heard of anybody using medium format cameras with Photoscan? >> I have not. But the 5DS ultimately has brought medium format to the prosumer level. So before the 5DS, you had the phase one, right? So you wanted a medium format digital back 50 megapixel camera, you had to spend $50,000 for a phase one. 5DS came out, now we have 50 megapixel, which is really high. So I don’t know if even going beyond that with Photoscan would work. >> It’s useful. >> You have to try it. Cuz medium back digital cameras are now probably 150 megapixels, I’m not sure. >> Mm-hm. >> Yeah, so yeah, but I think ultimately the 5DS, if you wanted really high res models, can’t imagine needing more than that. >> Fair enough. >> Cool. >> How much detail do you do on the geometry and assets and textures behind the camera? >> Like none. >> Yeah, and because the thing is you’re just thinking about how it’s gonna affect the reflectivity, right? And so since things are glossy, like if things were chrome, then it would be a different issue. But since things are glossy and they’re rocky and the glossiness is like 0.2 to 0.4 on a lot of things, then it’s getting a blurry reflection, so it’s behind. So what I do is I put the geometry behind, but it’s not detailed at all. It’s just sculpt geometry, simple shapes. But I will put a texture or a shader on it that’s the color that I want. So I want warm light being reflected into the scene as if there’s some warm sandstone behind the camera. Then I’ll think about the color of the texture that’s on the thing behind the camera. But I wouldn’t worry about it being like Zbrush or anything. Cool. >> Next question. Okay. >> How does the process change when you’re doing it for humans and animation? >> For humans it’s completely different because everything I’m doing is a static object that doesn’t move, right? And therefore Photoscan, where you’re walking around an object, works perfectly fine. The moment you have a person that is breathing and trying to sit still, but really not. Anybody in here who’s done figure drawing know that no matter how much models try and sit still, 20 minutes later you’re just like, dude, that’s not the same pose you were in. >> [LAUGH] >> Right. So the problem is basically that things that move, then Photoscan will not be able to solve at all. So if you go online and look at companies like Infinite Realities, I believe, is one that’s in the UK, where they’re using Photoscan to do scans of people. They have a rig that has like 100 cameras. So imagine 100 5Ds in a big sphere all pointing to the center, where you hit a button and they all take a picture at the same time, right? That’s how they’re doing it. So it’s the exact same process that we’re doing, exactly the same, but they spent $200,000 on cameras. >> [LAUGH] >> Yeah. And so, but that’s what’s necessary because with that solution, with all of these cameras taking the picture at once, you click, you get all 109 of the photos you need, they’re all taken in the same instant, so you can get scans of people. So if you go on the website for Infinite Realities and I think it’s 1024, another one that’s doing it. >> Yeah, 1024. >> They’re crazy. Like they’re unbelievable looking, the scans of people, but they’re photogrammetry. It’s exactly what we just did, but they had to invest in this large array of digital cameras to shoot all the pictures of all the rows at once. So if you row from above, you row from here, you row from below, but it’s all shot with the click of a button. Yeah. >> Sorry, so how do you get it to deform for animation? >> What do you mean? To deform for animation? >> Yes. >> For one of those characters? >> Yes. >> Well, that gets into regular rigging, like bringing that character into Maya, character rigging it so that an animator could animate it. Yeah. >> It’s just Ninja Theory are using that technology on Hellblade. And I believe if I understood them correctly, they’re scanning individual facial expressions for wrinkles. >> Right. That’s something I’m not super familiar, I know what you’re talking about, cuz I’ve seen that online too, but how that’s done, I don’t know. >> Okay, thank you. >> Okay. >> Any more questions on the floor? We have a couple online, if that’s okay. >> On Twitter, Tony is asking, what do you recommend for photogrammetry of items like juice bottles or glass or drinks? Drinks? >> Get some 50% gray primer paint and spray paint them. >> Ah. >> Yeah, photo scan’s not gonna like transparent objects, it’s not gonna understand it. So that’s what I’ve seen people do. Obviously it’s gotta be a thing you’re allowed to do that to. But yeah, that would be the best solution. It’s just to paint them. Yeah. >> And Voyager FX is asking, do you see VR production using photogrammetry for scenes involving natural environments, for example a world exploration VR experience? >> Yeah, I think it already is. And so I’ve already been in a couple sort of VR things with Oculus and the Vive. There’s one we got here and it’s Brad and I was playing with it earlier today. And looking at the assets that were on the ground in that underwater demo with the bioluminescent stuff, maybe you guys have seen that demo. Just looking at the rocks on the ground in there, it’s just like, that’s photo scan. >> [LAUGH] >> It’s so perfect looking. So yeah, definitely. And then X-Rez, which is a rad company that belongs to Eric Hansen and Greg Downing, they’ve been using photogrammetry for a long time and using drones. So they’ll have GoPro or bigger cameras on a drone and be able to fly around an area. So I know they did a New York music video in a fjord in Iceland and they have the drone with the camera and it’s flying it around this fjord. And then they’re taking those photos into photo scan and building that set. So obviously the application of that for VR is yeah, if you wanna just make an experience of walking through an area, then you could photo scan it. Yeah, it’d be cool. >> Awesome. And then we’ll take one last question on Twitter unless anyone else. There’s one over here. Let me do the Twitter. I’ll do the quick one on Twitter and I’ll come over to you. So Joseph is asking, is Photoscan reliant on CPU, RAM, or GPU when building your point cloud and polygon mesh? >> Both, CPU and GPU. So if I remember correctly, you go in and you can enable the GPU optimization part in Photoscan. >> Where is the next question? Can you? Okay. >> Hi, have you ever thought about using tinfoil to get a more custom feel? Because like you said, the scale doesn’t matter, right? For the rocks and making it look like it’s a large area. So a thought came to my mind like you could use tinfoil to adjust it the way you want it and make it painted. >> Of course. Yeah, totally. I mean something that I haven’t done much of yet, but it’s something that I wanna do is photogrammetry basically gives us the opportunity to get back to something like clay again. So for example, something that I thought would be cool, I haven’t tried yet, but it is something that I think could work, is I bought the clay, I just haven’t tried it yet. It’s just like sit on a table with a whole bunch of clay and then I can just sit and sculpt the layout for a scene and just like sit and figure out this is the canyon. And with your hands, with clay, real fast, and block things out and grab rocks from outside and pebbles and lay out a goddamn little set on my table. And then picture, picture, picture, picture, picture, picture, picture, photo scan and now I have the block out for my set done that way. That seems pretty cool. There’s no reason why you wouldn’t be able to do that. So the fact that you could use soft clay and block out environments and areas and compositions and photo scan it real quick as a way to block out a scene is something I’m super curious about if that could be an effective way to start doing scene layout. Could be cool. So something like tinfoil or whatever, yeah, it’s like using real world objects and combining them together and using that as a way to create alphas all through scanning and knowing that you’re going to photo scan it later. Sure. Excellent. So I think that’s it. One last question. It’s always on the opposite side of the room. How do we access this video? Google Nomen livestream and you’ll get to our livestream page and you’ll see in there. Do you think that photos can be an easier time to mask out the object if you have a green screen or something behind it? But then you’re going to get all this green spill on our screen light that you then have to further process your photos to remove the green spill. And I don’t think that would make it any easier because what I showed is really easy. You just have the photo of the background without the object and it made pretty much a perfect mask. So I think there’s no reason why. I have seen some images online where people clearly were using a green screen instead of the white background. But to me I just preferred the idea of my object being enveloped in white for more even lighting. Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. Okay, I’m calling it.