I was wondering if anybody has used laser scanning tech in their pipelines before, particularly from a character art point of view, and what they thought of it?

As a character artist, the thought that a machine can capture a photo-realistic, highpoly "sculpt" and texture passes in minutes rather than the weeks it would take me to do by hand is fairly scary!
I've talked with the guys that run a few services here in the UK and the costing and timeframes they gave me for a completed in-game character weren't too far off going down the traditional route, with the added positive of being photo accurate, but I was wondering if there were any unforseen hurdles that people had encountered when using it in production, or prep they wish they had done beforehand that added to the timeframes or overall budgets etc.


Any hands on feedback would be really interesting to hear.

All you can really scan is a face so how much are you actually going to get out of it? And will the results be what you want?

Heres what I mean on one of your models:


I prefer your original :P Plus the time and cost for scanning the head are surly many times higher than just sculpting and texturing the head.

Haha- amazing work Keen! I knew there was something missing from my character when I made him - you totally nailed it! I'll go back and make those corrections right away.

The laser scanning places I have talked to can do full high poly scans of both heads and bodies, although there is a fair amount of cleanup on the body stuff as the resolution isn't there to capture such a large area. Costings and timeframe was fairly similar to what I would expect for a character modelled the traditional way, maybe slightly more but not considerably.

I'm not totally sold on the idea, and would personally rather keep the 3D package => Sculpting package => Texturing package approach, but am looking into the scanning for a project and trying to work out what potential pitfalls there could be down the road using this tech.

Another problem is of course you have to have a physical source to scan...

Would be seriously cool to get to play with a scanner though!

This is another cost effective technique I came across the other day.

http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthr...le-photographs!

While probably not as accurate as laser scanning, it sure would save a lot of time when making realistic models.