SCAD x The Mill Week 4: Environment and Photogrammetry

This week, after fixing some previously noted camera bugs, I spent the majority of my time processing a set of photogrammetry scans for use in the scene environment. I have scans of a shopfront and old motorbike which I took in Lesvos Greece, as well as a very textured street in Philadelphia PA.

Renders + Texture passes available here

These scans are incredibly high poly with 8k textures, although their level of detail varies depending on how dense each area is / how much coverage they received.

I’ve simplified any/all flat surfaces to reduce polygon count without losing fidelity. Sharp corners and higher detail areas are reduced to a lesser degree in order to retain fidelity and imperfections.

From this point I baked the normals from the original models into a tangent space map for the new models, along with new UVs making it possible to edit in substance.

In substance, I selectively integrated the baked normal data and experimented with painting over external PBR textures to emulate geometric detail / rough jagged surfaces.

For the window on the shopfront I extracted visible fingerprints and graffiti to turn into information for a glass shader. I painted these details out of the original texture so that they could be layered back onto a modeled glass plane.

These are subject to change. The polycount on the street model is optimized to how I plan on placing it in the scene, but if we decide to put it elsewhere I may alter where the fidelity is localized.

This old motorbike scan, while interesting, requires a lot of cleanup + additional modeling. Since it is not the central figure, I’m hesitant to commit too much time to cleaning it up.

My immediate priority is working with my team to integrate these assets in a way that plays to their strengths and lends a sense of realism to the environment we’ve begun to lay out, as well as play a part in the process of refining that environment overall so that it can best lend itself to a clean and striking composition