“Plodding through the desert, the hero comes upon remains of indeterminate origin, picked clean by vultures.”
“Sneaking through the dragon’s cave, the bones of its previous meal crunch beneath your feet.”
“The detective opens an interior door in the killer’s house to reveal a horrifying scene.”
Every game needs the right props to set the mood and tell the story. After the amazement of seeing a model digitized using photogrammetric techniques for the first time, and realizing I had access to most of a cow skeleton (dead of natural causes, animal lovers), I knew what my next pack idea was: Necro’s Bone Box (name subject to decay…err, change).
The following image shows some VERY preliminary images of what I’m working on, and were taking from fairly hipoly models imported into Blender. After the scanning process, there is a lot of cleanup that needs to be done in Zbrush, and retopologizing to get a workable mesh for UE4. I plan for the final pack to contain an assortment of bones and bone-piles. If the pack eventually makes it to the Marketplace, I’m planning on ordering some human bones (fake, of course) to scan for future inclusion in the pack.
Is this something anyone would even be interested in?
Thanks lunyBunny and TwistedPrism! Yah, photogrammetry is basically magic Once I get the bone pile done and in UE4, I’ll post a new pic.
I’m planning on scanning several different individual bones, and then creating multiple piles from those. For some reason, I really want to do a bone wind-chime too
Oh yes, PhotoScan is pretty awesome. The quality of the resulting meshes and textures is very dependent on the quality of the photos you take (of course). If nothing else, it’s got me to start learning the expensive camera I bought years ago and never used
The skull model was actually generated from around 70 pictures (probably overkill) taken from a Samsung Galaxy cell phone (I think it’s 14 megapixels?). I’ve read that anything over 8 megapixels works, but the higher the resolution, the more PhotoScan has to work with to generate spacial data from. I use my Canon EOS Rebel T5i that I bought years ago for $800 (think you can get it for $650 now on Amazon). I use the stock lens it came with, but I can’t remember the specs on it off the top of my head. You don’t want a zoom lens, and you don’t want to use a fish eye lens. I’m not sure if you can use a macro lens (if you wanted to model stuff like bugs and such).
You want the f-stop to be between 8 and 16 (from Making - Tested, a decent starter on the topic). That way, most of the object you’re taking photos of should be in focus. If a little bit of the object is blurry, it shouldn’t matter, since every photo is going to have significant (40% or so) overlap. If shooting outdoors, only take shots when the sun is obscured by clouds, so the lighting is diffuse. I got tired of always waiting, so i bought a 3’x3’x3’ light tent to shoot the objects in. If you’re gonna use a light tent, get a stand for your camera, as you shouldn’t be using a flash. Anyways, the standard license for Photoscan is $170 I think, and I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.
Oh, and if anyone was wondering why the leg bone in the Sketchfab has stickers on it, I was trying to add points of interest for PhotoScan to match to. The only one that it keyed in on very well was the star sticker. These of course won’t be in the final product
I’m currently working on the skull again, this time taking the shots in the light tent, on the turntable. The only problem is I have to mask every single texture. With the leg bone, this wasn’t bad because it fit entirely within the borders of the turntable, which was black. This offered enough contrast that the quick select mask took in Photoshop did a pretty good job most of the time. But the skull is big, and a lot of time the backdrop behind it is the light tent itself (which is white), so the contrast is not so good. This makes masking a PAAAAAIN. In the future, I’ll probably be changing the backdrop to a more contrasting color. Or green screen.
Thanks Obsidiaguy! Yah, to get good results it can become a bit involved, but even without knowing too much, or with too much equipment, you can still get decent results. The first picture on the page of the skull was done on a cell phone camera. After you get your model and texture from PhotoScan, there’s still a lot of work to get it game ready. You have to clean it up in ZBrush, then generate a low poly model to use in-game. Then I created a normal map in xNormal from the high poly and low poly models. The thing I didn’t do yet that needs to be done is redoing the UVs. PhotoScan creates horrible UV maps.
The leg bone is around 7.5k, which is probably too high for such a small asset. I was thinking it might be nice to include a fairly high poly version of the leg though, in case someone wanted to use it as a FPS weapon? Here’s a question I haven’t seen good answers for: what’s a reasonable poly count for assets like these (decorative, fairly small)? Keep in mind that I’m not targeting mobile.
This was a quick and dirty bake without a cage, so things within the eye sockets got screwed up in the normal map. But it makes the horns look a lot nicer.
I don’t have access to an entire skeleton, but I’ll be doing several different bones. I have some leg bones, ribs, pelvic bones, and some vertebrae. I also got another cow skull from a friend, and this one looks a lot cooler (still has its horn sheathes). I might also be able to get my hands on some deer, ram, and wild pig skulls from a hunter relative, but I haven’t checked if he still has them (though it would be cool for some variety).
Once I’m done and have submitted, and if it manages to make it through to the Trello, I plan on ordering some human bone reproductions from Amazon to scan and add to the pack.
The flash light effect is faked in Photoshop, just to give the scene a more ominous feel. Once I have more bones scanned, I’m going to make different sized piles using construction blueprints, so you can easily drop a pile in the map.
Once I get the bone pile done and in UE4, I’ll post a new pic.
