Easier tool to create SEV/Star Fury ship?

[bearclaw]

I just came across this beta download from Microsoft. And while I don't know a wit about CG in any form, I thought I'd put it up for others to see if this may be of any use?

What is it? Microsoft Live Labs Photosynth. Here's a description from the MS site:

Brief Description
Photosynth takes a large collection of photos of a place or object, analyzes them for similarities, and displays them in a reconstructed 3-dimensional space.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/d...displaylang=en

[narf poit chez BOOM]

Cool. So you could make lego ships...

They only have movies there. The full program probably costs a lot.

[Hugh Manatee]

you could do what that program does manually. Take a picture of you're "subject" or sketch it from 2 or 3 axis and then trace around it by manually placing vertecies where they would go. This is how people generally model cars, faces ect. Then you hit a "fill" button all the pollys are added then you just clean it up.

http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=20448

[Ed Kolis]

2 or 3 axes? I don't think so... I did some experimentation with booleans in Povray once and I think you really need a fairly large number of axes (i.e. photos) to get a reasonable approximation... Take a sphere, for instance. A sphere looks like a circle from all directions. Suppose you had 1 photo. You could end up with something as far off as a cylinder! 2 photos? OK, how about a cross shape made out of cylinders truncated in just the right way so that the curvature looks circular from those 2 particular angles. 3 photos? Same thing as 2, only with six projections instead of four. Get the picture?
Now, if this thingy manages to actually deduce contours from the shading on the physical object and construct the model accordingly, that is pretty nifty... that would greatly reduce the number of photos required, though it would be totally screwed up by multi-colored objects!

[narf poit chez BOOM]

From the sound of it, it just arranges the pictures three-dimensionally. Still impressive photo-recognition, though.

[Hugh Manatee]

Ed Kolis said:
2 or 3 axes? I don't think so... I did some experimentation with booleans in Povray once and I think you really need a fairly large number of axes (i.e. photos) to get a reasonable approximation... Take a sphere, for instance. A sphere looks like a circle from all directions. Suppose you had 1 photo. You could end up with something as far off as a cylinder! 2 photos? OK, how about a cross shape made out of cylinders truncated in just the right way so that the curvature looks circular from those 2 particular angles. 3 photos? Same thing as 2, only with six projections instead of four. Get the picture?
Now, if this thingy manages to actually deduce contours from the shading on the physical object and construct the model accordingly, that is pretty nifty... that would greatly reduce the number of photos required, though it would be totally screwed up by multi-colored objects!

No I actually mean 3 axes, see attached picture(import it into you're 3D program as a world background or apply it to a plane then draw over it to form your mesh), you start with a side profile, outline from the chin, lips, nose and forehead, then in the front view outline the jawline, eyes, and cheeks(you only model half the object, then mirror it), being careful of the amount of vertecies you add. You want them to all line up so when you hit fill you have quads and quads only(this is where i messed my first face attempt). Then you switch to the top view(or split the screen in 4 so you can see it from each angle with a 3D rotatable view) and grab and move each row of vertecies into place, making minor sculpting adjustments as you go. Using just the side profile and the head on profile I made a head in about 1-2 hours on my first go(as I said it sucked, a few n-gons cause I wasn't paying attention so I scrapped it, next time I'm lining the verts up better)

To do a sphere with 2 axes outlines(1 circle drawingI guess importen into your background), first outline a circle of verts on 1 axis(or use a wieghted curve or some such), then extrude it up a bit, scale it in to line up with your second axis profile(if you're modeling program scales everything uniformly you should have a pretty good sphere going), extrude it up, scale down, extrude up, scale down, repeat this as often as you want for a desired smoothness and poly resolution, and when you get to the top, extrude 1 more time, scale down and merge all the vertecies into 1 point. Mirror this geode lookin thing, remove any doubles on the equator and boom, a semi perfect sphere from 2 circle drawings(although pointless because most programs have them built in as primatives but this could be used to make the back of a skull for the above face).

For a car, you need a few more perspectives, side, front back, top, and maybe bottom to get all the lights and fenders. Same deal, outline the side view(this outline loop wil be the exact mid point of the car), extrude it out in the front view outlining the general shape, then add cuts extrusions and geometry where the headlihgts, fenders and stuff would go.

[Xrati]

Ed Kolis said:
I did some experimentation with booleans in Povray once

I think I tried that once when I was younger. Mostly beers though!

If it's a microsofty product I'd wait about ten years until they get the bugs out buy releasing a new program that they stole from someone, that was written in response to their program...

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

narf poit chez BOOM said:
Cool. So you could make lego ships...

www.ldraw.org

[frightlever]

The GalCiv 2 ship editor is easy to use - any way to export the models from it?

[narf poit chez BOOM]

Thanks, looks neat.