On-set tips: The importance of high frequency detail / by Xuan Prada

Quick tip here. Whenever possible use some kind of high frequency detail to capture references for your assets. In this scenario I'm scanning with photos this huge rock, with only 50 images and very bad conditions. Low lighting situation, shot hand-held, no tripod at all, very windy and raining.
Thanks to all the great high frequency detail on the surface of this rock the output is quite good to use as modeling reference, even to extract highly detailed displacement maps.

Notice in the image below that I'm using only 50 pictures. Not much you might say. But thanks to all the tiny detail the photogrammetry software does very well reconstructing the point cloud to generate the 3D model. There is a lot of information to find common points between photos.

The shooting pattern couldn't be more simple. Just one eight all around the subject. The alignment was completely successfully in Photoscan.

As you can see here, even with a small number of photos and not the best lighting conditions, the output is quite good.

I did an automatic retopology in Zbrush. I don't care much about the topology, this asset is not going to be animated at all. I just need a manageable topology to create a nice uv mapping and reproject all the fine detail in Zbrush and use it later as displacement map.

A few render tests.