I came across this job posting and I was going to email them and tell them no way! So anyhow, this is the kind of stuff people want as I have seen several similar requests. Let’s laugh at them and then also get serious and talk about how this could happen in the future.
** “I need someone to help on creating an online Unreal Engine - VR software/portal to let people to easily change colors walls, flooring , add 3d furniture online in real-time to 360 virtual tours that we create with our cameras for real estate 360 tours. We will have new 360 tour posted online every day and we want an easy portal/software which can help us easily choose what can be modified in the 360 virtual tour of the real estate apartment and then post it online for people to easily modify the color of the walls or ceiling and add any 3d furniture. It needs to be working on desktop and on mobile.”**
The issue would be getting the 3D data, you would have to use something like Kinect to do a 3D scan of the room and then create a software that would analyze the data and recreate it with primitives so that it’s cleaned up. After that you could do whatever you want, but going from the depth camera to something usable would be a huge challenge. It’s probably not worth trying to get into–the results that you get with something like Kinect are not great, even with good 3D scanning hardware you’ll have issues with reflective or transparent materials so the whole thing would be a mess.
It sounds like they are wanting to supply video footage and change that - walls, furniture etc. Even if they wanted to do all UE4 you couldn’t do it because of building lighting for furniture changes.
$900, for the whole project? Yeah, they don’t know what they’re doing. We were looking into an idea where you could maybe scan blueprints and have it automatically make a 3D model from that, but it’s so complicated you could pay people to do it manually for much cheaper than it’d cost to make an automatic method.
You can. But it depends on the situation. They use that for doing 3D scans of people where you have an array of DSLR cameras that are rigged to take a photo at the same moment, the software then analyzes the cameras to find any points it can identify. For humans it works well because it can see your skin pores and that provides a ton of information, doesn’t work on something that’s featureless like a white wall. That’s why some depth cameras use an infrared projector to make their own points of light that work on empty surfaces or even in the dark. All methods have issues with reflective or transparent surfaces, or even dark objects since they don’t reflect much light.
There are programs like Versa Connector (TNDCI DEV) 0.0.1 - Sign On that can theoretically do this, but on a very small scale. This would have very low compatibility with UE4 when it comes to building light maps and having flexibility for changing materials on the fly.
We had done a prototype similar to HomeStyler** using Unity couple of years back. User can build the rooms, interiors and finally take a screenshot. But creating the room using camera images/video is near to impossible with the currently available tools.
I am not sure but I had seen a post somewhere here regarding real time scanning of person’s face and apply it to a Game character. According to the post, scanned data is converted into OBJ model which can be easily imported into 3D Engine. In their case, they had seamless workflow where everything happens in matter of minutes. Some studio has developed it in association with Epic I guess. They had uploaded the video from one of the Game developer event or something like that. As @darthviper107 mentioned it may be easier to re-create face than build a architectural 3D model.
May be when such scanners or Project Tango(from Google) evolve, we may be able to address only part of the features this Job posting is talking about. Even then, it will be near to impossible to automate the Lighting to match the actual camera recordings.
As darthviper107 said, the time and effort are huge to be worth of pursuing such things.
I have to admit that’s pretty impressive for what it is. Sure it’s not photoreal and what most Archviz guys would ideally like but a good solution for some like realtors.
Bwahahahaha…
