2nd category: For RC newbies – A fly-through video of a dragon model
Video : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZfH6sPAOOg
Hello everyone,
Like SDRN, I’m from Paris. I decided to look for dragons at the Musée du Louvre. There are only a handful of those creatures over there, and most of them aren’t suitable for photogrammetry : they are either made of glass or very poorlly lit. I ended up choosing this statue by Paul-Ambroise Slodtz, created in 1732. It used to be on a building in Paris and was later moved to the Louvre.
Shooting this dragon was not as easy as I hoped : it is hanged on a wall (red circle) which means that when you’re facing it, you are well below it. Using a tripod or monopod is forbidden at the Louvre.
In order to get different point of views and to reconstruct the whole dragon, I decided to shoot from three different levels (red arrows). I used a Sony A7RII and two lenses : a 28-70mm and a 70-200mm. The 70-200 was very helpful to get some very different point of views.
Another issue was the lighting : this was a windy & partly cloudy day, which meant that the light was changing between pictures. I decided not to use fixed settings and just to try to expose each picture correctly. I know this can be risky, but RealityCapture usually does a pretty good job at blending pictures.
In the end, I’m quite happy with the result. RealityCapture created a 42 millions triangles 3D model ; this was too heavy for my GPU to display, so I used the Simplify Tool to lower the triangle count a little bit, then I created the texture and captured the video.