SCANNING FOR SUCCESS

Senior 3D artist at Smoke & Mirrors Dimitar Kralev shares some expert advice for 3D scanning

Dimitar Kralev and the CG team at Smoke & Mirrors turned to Maya and Houdini for much of their work on the campaign, while Nuke and Flame were the weapons of choice for the final stages of production. The team also tried to utilise open-source photogrammetry tools like Meshroom and Instant Meshes. Kralev shares his advice for 3D scanning: “The easiest way to improve the final result is to make sure you have high-resolution, well-lit photos without motion blur, depth of field or chromatic aberration.” Kralev and the team had to partially abandon this approach due to the reflective areas, repeating pattern and the pure black parts of the shoe.

“The second technique we used was to create the moire effect procedurally by stacking parallel lines on top of each other, but then letting each set of lines have their own UV channel,” he continues. “By twisting and deforming the UVS of only one set of lines, we could easily generate all kinds of patterns. For the motion thread shots, we used Houdini and built an array of animated primitives that were later meshed and exported to Alembic caches for rendering in V-ray for Maya.”