Hi there,
For nearly a decade I have been working as a technician and project manager in a 3D scanning business, working on various AAA games such as Medal of Honor, Mass Effect, Grand Theft Auto, and a whole variety of movies. Recently, I decided to start my own business as I could no longer afford to work for my former employer. Having never worked with Zbrush or any other sculpting package (I’ve tried blender, because it seemed more accessible, but never really got into it) I had quite a few skills to master in a short time.
I thought I’d share some of the more recent work with the pro’s in the house.
As I said, I work in the 3D scanning industry. I don’t want to offend the hardcore zbrush artists out there by claiming I can actually ‘sculpt’ things that look this good, but it does take some effort to take a raw scan, retopologize it and make it look presentable and usable for a client. The process from scan to final asset typically takes approximately 8 hours for a headscan; a body will take up to a few days.
Here’s me, quite literally. I made a scan of myself in my one and only suit and tie. For this model I did separate scans of my head, shirt, tie, jacket, pants, hands and the shoes were done with a NextEngine desktop laser scanner. In the picture, all parts except my head are cleaned up, retopologized, UVed and texture maps have been created from the original high resolution photography that comes with the scanning process. To go from a ‘rough’ scan to this final result took me about 4 days.
I would like to add that I am in no way a texture expert. All the texturing is done by a friend of mine whom I’ve worked with for years. She’s excellent and does it way faster than I ever could. I take NO credit for the textures! If anything I can take credit for the high resolution photography that comes with the process, which allows for the creation of excellent texture maps.
This week I’ve been working on another piece to highlight the creation of crowd or video game characters, showing how to create very low resolution models which show all the details of a 1M+ polygon model. I like to think there’s a lot of use for these types of assets, where companies or artists can access a database of existing characters for any kind of situation (parade, carnival, restaurant, angry mob, …) and pop them into a scene to fill up the background. The way I’ve been doing this over the years is by creating assets that can be switched out to create a variety of characters using the same building blocks, much like a little Lego character, popping off the head and legs and sticking in new ones. I can proudly say I’ve done hundreds of those for some of the video games I’ve worked on. My plan is to create my own database of downloadable assets, though I realize this may take some time!
On a few occasions in the past I have worked together with artist, both traditional and digital, on projects where people were looking to either create a backup of their art or use 3d scanning and modeling as a source for creating new art. Some of the crazier projects were scanning a 40 foot statue, manipulating it and having it printed life-size for somebody’s backyard! On some occasions artists used a 3d scan of a person they found visually interesting and used it as a base for their own projects.
I would like to invite all artists out there who are interested to try it out! I would be very much interested in working together with people and be a part of their work.
I hope to post more of my work soon!
Cheers,
Jan