the only issues i really had with the mesh were 1) … retopo was a real pain but that was mostly due to having to work around wings and head which wasnt treating me very well… and 2… they really arent kidding when they say shiny surfaces wont work right… the orb the dragon is grabbing is actually a faceted crystal with a bit of gougign from it and some dirt on it… the only detailing it caught was the breifest hint of the facet edges and the dirt… yet it still managed to come out looking pretty nice.
to get it to that point i took the original scanned mesh… split by polygroups… brought in textures… converted textures to displacement map… did a minor displacement on each part… merged to single high poly mesh… … merged original to single low poly mesh… retopoed low poly… nothing fancy just all quads… projected all… color>texture …texture to displacement… and that was pretty much it…
was working today to try to retopo it a little bit nicer but gave up… too many tight spaces for my insubstantial amount of concentration to navigate … want to play around with was photofly can do with some more source material now like landscapes and such… i actually am planning on using my friends 5dmk2 to power through a few hundred shots of another friends awesome 3 tiered back yard… i’ve been contemplating uses for something like that and i’m thinking if with a really high quality camera you can map large environmental areas… u can really quickly match an object or environment for work in green screening and such… if u can match the lighting u will be filming with when you shoot the source pictures… u can pretty easily get the generated mesh to have the lighting baked right into the texture… so much potential for knocking time off production pipelines if the technology improves a bit more
edit : just to note that particular mesh was generated with 48 pictures from a pentax k-x (@ ~12.5mp) shot indoors with horrible 3 point lighting from 3 flourescent bulbs… no greater then 120 watts total…no tripod… i just took my sweet ass time getting every concievable needed angle and it helps that i take pretty damn good photos when i want to… i can only imagine what a 5dmk2 and good studio lighting can do… again though patience… u rally need every 15 degrees from maybe 3-4 different heights for something clean… and you gotta be willing to try hand stiching things in if photofly drops them… get everything u can squeeze into it.
