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A few months ago I made a tutorial on 3D scanning with a camera and free software. I tried Memento from autodesk and it does the same thing so I made a new tutorial on that one. Some things are easier or better with it but there are some drawbacks too.

 

Here's the tutorial.

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Excellent video, Phil. As always. Keep'em going!

And as always I have some questions. :D

Have you tried processing the eagle with your initial method? One day of waiting seems awful long and it's probably so because it's like with render farms I had the "pleasure" to work with. Your model is awaiting processing after other people's stuff gets done. Which is not the case when you process the model on a local workstation.

At around 8:52 you mention that some areas are not as dense as others. Is it possible that have you missed those areas when doing detail shots of the eagle? Or might it be the fault of the program? Having uniform points distribution is pretty important when dealing with point colours.

Have you considered making a video that would be a comparison of your original processing method with the new one? This would be very interesting. Maybe your next video could cover this? ;)

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With 3D-Coat and photogrammetry I see two problems:
1) It does not read vertex colours (and other vertex data).
2) When this kind of a model is loaded into 3D-Coat, the program places all colour info into Layer 0 -  instead of placing it into a new paint layer. This makes impossible to change it afterwards, unless some tricks exist, that I'm not aware of.

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Thanks. I have not tried the eagle but a number of my other models were done in both programs to test. In fact you can see the rock from the first tutorial in project list in this one.  The the program is definitely decimating the mesh. You can see the less dense areas are usually flat spots with not much detail.

 

3D-Coat does read vertex colors. I've never done it but I've heard that it does. With these models 3DC converts the image texture into vertex colors,which is the whole problem of density. In Meshlab you can solve this problem by adding more polys in the areas that need them. Then you have plenty to work with in 3DC.

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3D-Coat does read vertex colors. I've never done it but I've heard that it does. With these models 3DC converts the image texture into vertex colors,which is the whole problem of density. In Meshlab you can solve this problem by adding more polys in the areas that need them. Then you have plenty to work with in 3DC.

I never succeeded in importing vertex colour. Just tried once more, to no avail.

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Phil, you know 3D-Coat much better than I do. Is it possible that it worked once, but broke somewhere between the versions?

I just created this feature request (from my last post), so please feel free to add a +1 to it if you think it's worth it. I think this feature (or perhaps two features to be exact) would be a very useful thing to have. For instance:

- You could completely ignore the step of creating UVs in MeshLab (through parametrization). Just bake textures to vertices and import the object straight to 3D-Coat (I'm referring to your previous scanning tutorial).

- Importing vertex attributes to separate paint layers would enable us to edit them. That's contrary to the current state of things where textures (from bitmaps) are loaded into Layer0 so you can't do much with them because, as a rule, fiddling with Layer0 = trouble) and unfortunately copy channels doesn't work with this layer.

- Rebake textures from UVed objects to vertices of a hires mesh with MeshLab and import vertex coloured sculpture back to 3D-Coat. This would rock in situations when you have a lowpoly model UVed and textured, but vertex colours in the sculpture, and you need to introduce major changes to the sculpt without loosing too much of the textures that already exist.

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