Photogrammetry At Home | with Miki Bishop and Robert Simpson
Updated: May 21, 2021
After I released my FACS series, some people reached out to me on LinkedIn with questions (which is totally cool by the way). One person asked if it was possible to do photogrammetry at home...I said yes, that I'd never done it myself but knew people who did!
For this post I'd like to introduce two very good friends of mine. They worked around our limitations in college and did some pretty cool stuff!
Michael "Miki" Bishop (she/her) is a character artist who has worked at big name studios such as Minecraft and Microsoft Avatars. She was the art lead for all of our student games at DigiPen and her direction was imperative for the success of our team.
Robert Simpson (he/him) is a lighting artist who's worked at studios like Camouflaj and Sucker Punch. He always went out of his way to learn new industry techniques to improve his portfolio and is undoubtedly one of the hardest working people I know.
Character Photogrammetry
Miki borrowed a DSLR camera from the school library and asked our friend Tori to model for her. The model sat in a swivel chair, and rotated slightly as Miki took pictures of her head. She ended up with around 250+ pictures of the turn around.
She used a software called Autodesk Recap to extract an .obj from the pictures. She then cleaned it up in zBrush and retopologized it in Maya.
Here's the turnaround of the character (the head is photogrammetry, the body was sculpted by Miki).
Tori (the model) is also an incredible artist herself, check out her stuff!!
Environment Photogrammetry
The process of scanning for environments is very similar. Rob experimented with a bunch of different software such as Autodesk Remake/Recap and Agisoft Metashape. In the end, his favorite ended up being Reality Capture, which you can buy the license for on Steam. He also recommended this youtube playlist which talks about the pipeline he followed.
All of my friends are very talented and I feel blessed that I can learn from them every day.
-Fernanda