Asset: Idle Animations for Bringing Photogrammetry to Life

guess I'm doing something really wrong, I tried to attach the armature to a mesh, ctrl+p. automatic weights and , after a bit of "blender is not responding" it just creates the thing with the armature animating super slow (4fps on a ryzen9 +3090) and the mesh standing still

Jay aka Cans.One

Hey John, my first time commenting on Patreon so not sure how it works or if you'll see this or whatnot. But the best and only HDRI solution for very large scale scenes is an addon called "Sceneskies HDRI Pack". It is just incredible. Go look into it on the Blender Market. Hope that helps a bunch

may i know how to do that time machine disappear effect on blender?

Reo Ma

you probably already know that but you can slide the curves of the bones in the graph editor to adjust the rig to the model (the curves that are responsible for the rotation), it won't affect the keyframe so the animation still works and the rest pose is closer to the original mesh.

Wow You're so generous with giving out content, you know what you should do, you should get some community JAM's going using the assets you upload :D

Jack_Wolfe

I believe it's the little hard surface details If you look at his truck modeling video he goes over how not adding the little detail makes the ship look like a toy and that might end up being your issue

Arsh Waseem

same man not many have experimented with optimizing fluid sims in blender and hopefully IAN does something cool with it where we can actually have sims without 1 terabyte caches (ouch)

Arsh Waseem

experimenting with fluid sims?! hell yeah. looking forward to your tutorial when you've figured it out so I can finally be bothered to learn about it

it's that guy!

Oh! The tutorial was mostly going to be from low-down (which I think i do out of habit for exactly the reason you're describing :P, but also because landscapes tend to feel more "epic" when you're looking up at them)- but dang, yeah that's a hard one. My thought right now: the easiest way to get it all to work is to find a really useful HDRI for the actual horizon/sky, that way you only have to make the ground extend a long ways and then "blend in" to the HDRI (if your scene has some haze in it it becomes a lot easier)- If you have a big (or a few) large ground planes, maybe you could implement almost the reverse of the video below, so that they start to fade out at a certain distance and naturalistically blend into the environment map? I've tried it before in the past with pretty good luck. https://www.patreon.com/posts/quickie-making-55192869 If you have a bunch of ground geometry, it might be worth making a node setup like the one above, but then turning it into a node group, so you can super-quickly slap it on to any object that happens to be near the horizon and control the distance falloff globally, like at 17:30 in this video: https://www.patreon.com/posts/tutorial-making-56088138 I'll try to think about it more though and see if I can think of anything else- A drone shot of a city being built sounds absolutely kickass :D

Ian Hubert

Ok so I’ve been going through the shots you posted from your scenes on this video multiple times now, and the ship scene really blowed me away. Ok so a quick back story, In the past month I’ve seen dune and foundation on apple tv, something that really caught my eye was their ships in frame, for some reason the ships have this size about them that I haven’t seen from other movies/ shows (e.g marvel/Star Wars) but now your ship and the scene that they are in has the same feel. It’s bugging me why that is. I feel like the only way I can figure it out is to make the same scene as yours and fail to make it work (I learn from failing) to figure out the reason, maybe it’s the focal length of the camera, the light or many other reasons but I want to know!!!!! Hahaha

Sai

Hey Ian! Concerning the "big landscapes" video you mentioned, will you be including getting horizons to work? I'm making a scene within which there is a drone shot of a city being built and the hardest part is getting a believable horizon from an above perspective. I'm sure you've had to figure this out in the past

Lovely to get to see a few shots early in the video. At 1:37 I thought it was thunder at first! So cool.

Colornap

The shot with the bird ship is MIND BLOWING. Awesome.

Followfocus

Ian might you still tackle a tutorial on photoscan best practices? I'd love to hear more about your cases for phone vs DSLR and strategy for how to handle larger environment capture.

Sam Goldwater

Marvellous... I'm supposed to be "at work"... but would much rather watch this/these videos... those rendered shot you showed look incredible. The "bird ship" is so different from your usual style... great contrast to the environment! Love it.

Doug Brown

YES! Half my problem with googling was a part of me thinking, "but surely this can't even be an actual problem, and there's just a button I'm missing..." although I'm honestly surprised I didn't stumble upon your thread during my search (though mostly I was searching, "how to apply automatic weights in pose mode!" instead of "how to alter rest pose without messing up the animation data") OH WAIT! I'd thought you'd made that script a while back- this is from an hour ago, haha! Man yeah!! I'm following the thread- hopefully someone has some transform matrix wizardry. If there could be a one-click solution for that, that'd be ludicrously cool! Thanks for poking at that!!

Ian Hubert

Ian has recently been using the polycam app on his iPhone and it actually gives some amazing results. I know it advertises itself as using the new LiDAR capabilities only in the newer iPhones but it also has a standard Photo Mode that delivers the bulk majority of good photoscans. Your older iPhone *should* be able to work with it :)

Ozzie

Augh, that old "Apply rest pose" problem still exists? Crazy the hoops you've got to jump through to get that to work. I foolishly and optimistically began writing a script to do this in one button press. It doesn't work with rotation yet, but who needs armature bones to rotate? https://blenderartists.org/t/script-to-apply-pose-as-rest-pose-without-corrupting-animation-action-keyframes/1335456

Paul and Anna Spooner

Thank you Ian! very useful technique, and beautiful, beautiful shots in the intro. Can't wait to watch the next episode :-)

Pablo Nicolas

Haha, I never heard anyone say that Blender's UI makes more sense than AE's! I suggest you should look into Blackmagic Fusion. If you're more used to node based interfaces it's a lot easier to grasp, and it's a way more powerful compositor than AE.

Zeke Faust

do you think you could possibly ever make a tutorial just talking about how you light your scenes, your render settings, and also after effects? i think after effects is something that i definitely struggle with because honestly the interface just looks so intimidating and thats what has kinda held me back from it. its kinda the opposite of blender because blender's interface is so smooth and nice and inviting that it just makes it so much easier for me to learn, if that makes sense.

Dawson Henderson

that shot with the projector at 1:29 is so sick! i love that

Dawson Henderson

As always Ian thanks for uploading! Always brightens my day!

Noah Simpson

Ian, I am a loyal fan and I enjoy all of your tutorials. You’re awesome. Have you tried combining/blending two or more mocap animations in Blender? For example combining a run, jump, and a climb motion. I know that it may be possible to do the whole thing in a single animation with Rokoko, but it’s nice to know that blending is possible.

Ian are you photo scanning with your DSLR or phone? I've been considering updating to a newer iphone just so I can photo scan objects and maybe people but I'm wondering if you can actually get good results with the phone or just low detail scans for background placement. Thanks!

Diego Nossa

I’m getting a rokoko suit soon( ordered back in July, but there are delays, which is understandable!) I’m looking forward to creating some Mocap for the community! I love the idea of us sending in photoscans of us in costume!

Oh yeah, this was Rokoko data! I can let you know what export settings I use to get it out of Rokoko when I get up tomorrow (on the blender side getting the data in is as easy as importing the FBX and remembering to check “correct bone orientation” in the import window) You had a chance to mess with the suit yet??

Ian Hubert

That’s why I’m trying to make the cg people better!! But yes! I have a biiiig practical shoot coming up at some point, at which point the focus will jump back to compositing for a long time. And for sure- I’ll try to do a deeper dive soon into scene/rendering optimizations :)

Ian Hubert

Well that would be amazing!! I’ll try to think through some logistics! If we could end up with a big library of scanned humans that anyone could use…. Okay that’s a very exciting thought :D

Ian Hubert

Hey Ian - why not open source the photoscan? Maybe see how many of us on here want to give it a go and scan ourselves and pick the useable ones. If you provide a dress code then I’m sure plenty of us would have a go at it?

Hey Ian, just wondering would you ever do a video similar to this for the rokoko suit and your method of transferring the data to blender? I know that rokoko has this already and I know not many people can afford the suite but my work has just bought one for their unreal users but I wanted to use it with blender I just pefer your method of teaching :)

Sai

please do anything with real people in real footage into cg world,, like in old green screen tuts.. these cg model people doesnt look good in amazing cg world you created. and how to manage ram and gpu memory optimization.. render layers.. rendering animations less time best output,, how do u manage them?? my pc is 6core 8gb rtx 4gb.. so help us!!

I agree!! I'm hoping to swap her all out with a good variety of other scans for the final renders. I came up with a kinda effective way of swapping her face out (basically just replacing it with the few faces I've gathered with "FaceApp"), but yeah, her hair/body are still a pretty good giveaway, for sure.

Ian Hubert

I always think it's odd to use Kaitlin as a background character when she is the lead. Too easy to spot her in 15 different places at one time especially with her hair :)

Gabrial Wolf

good stuff, Ian thanks!

Tolga Katas

Dude thats is awesome. The shots you've made there are so inspiring. Thank you for this!

Ah thanks! And that was actually exactly the one I was doing this morning before I abruptly pulled a U-turn and this one for some reason, haha- yeah! I want to do a kinda "big dramatic landscape with big clouds and lightrays" tutorial real quick here.

Ian Hubert

already loving the shots from the first few minutes! if you ever get around to it maybe a little tut on the volumetrics (like really getting those god rays from the lights and stuff)? it honestly looks way easier then it is haha.. cheers!

It's only midnight! (he protested quietly, knowing full well he'd be going to bed at 5am)

Ian Hubert

Night owl! Looking forward to watching this!