Asset: Old Concrete and Structures

you cantry to use the volume to mix diffuse

How are you getting the bluish tint to the water in the shots of the shallows? Is that cube with a mix of glossy/transparent material on it? I keep trying to replicate it and failing.

Great stuff. I played around with these assets while following your refraction tutorial. Crazy useful!

Manuel Grewer

I know the feeling!

Zach Hoy

These are incredible, can't wait to dive in

Zach Hoy

And now I need, not only an iPhone, but also an RTX 3090, and to switch to windows [:facepalm:] .... This is quickly becoming the most expensive patreon I've sub'd!

Pablo Nicolas

Yes very good point, suppose if there’s not a need, why bother! :)

Chris Alldridge

Cool, but where exactly would even sculpting come into Ian's workflow? A lot of his scenes are just simple cubes with some image textures on them, can't really see where sculpting would help there.

What about instant mesh? Can knock down a sculpt to about 4,000 verts. Free software and super helpful for optimising; models look great too! (So long as you aren’t planning to animate them)

Chris Alldridge

yea more verts = more render time. ian loves to optimize

As far as i know, he does use sculpting, but only really for cleaning up photoscans. The main reason he doesn't use sculpting that much is because you need a lot of vertices to sculpt well, and Ian more uses low-poly models to be able to use a lot of them.

This is really great. Do you ever do sculpting in blender? Haven’t seen any posts that feature you delving into the sculpt tools. If not, why?

Chris Alldridge

dude WOW thankyou so much!!! these are super fun to work with! im not worthy... D:

Here: (the scan is terrible and unedited, it’s just to test how promising this shadeless technique may be) https://poly.cam/capture/6C338E7E-8137-414E-A873-CD634707D4D8

Pablo Nicolas

Well, I did run a sort of test, and It worked! And the light source wasn't that big, I think this deserves some testing. I did a crude scan holding an iPad, and an amaran led light (same size of the ipad, like 8 x 9'') and only the most deep crevices retained some shadows. Bigger diffused lights will work better no doubt. I think that for not-so-big subjects this will work flawlessly.

Pablo Nicolas

I wonder. What if... Some real big soft box is attached to and around the camera somehow, or just behind with the camera at the center, so it casts a sort of almost-shadowless light, in every frame of the capture. Like a flash, but without the hard shadows behind. Then maybe the reconstructed object will be truly shadeless... Just an idea to think and test. I don't have any equipment capable of doing that at hand, but it must be doable... somehow...

Pablo Nicolas

I don't like apple's "evil" product policies, but I'm not anti-apple either. I recon that they do make some good products indeed. I like their OS a lot (a lot more than Windows at least), but not their hardware policies, so I'm a happy Hackintosh user ;-) (and I have a –non-LIDAR– iPad that now I use for Polycam :-D ). I never used RC, I'll give it a try. Trying to scan big or complex stuff like buildings or roads with Polycam ends too many times in weird nightmarish Lovecraftian landscapes that I don't know if they're utter trash or truly interesting findings... It looks like the LIDAR thing opens a whole lot of possibilities, I hear that it's capable of some clever motion capture too. Anyway, sadly I want my iphone now. The iPad is too big for scanning and prone to falling to the ground (yes it did).

Pablo Nicolas

AH YEAH! That's a good idea!! I keep using softboxes. The tricky thing is that if they get immediately behind the subject, unless if you've got a mega-sharp lens there's going to be some flaring, which kept messing up my textures- HUH ACTUALLY. I've got the big bright light source overhead, and I've been using this dirty drop cloth as a "bounce" underneath to *sort* of balance things out; I wonder if there's a cheapish retro-reflective surface I could use for the floor instead??

Ian Hubert

Ahahaha yeah the regrettable subtext to a lot of this photoscanning talk is "and iPhones are the best at it right now!" (I'm not particularly anti-apple, but the planned obsolescence and ever changing never-the-same-charging-cable-or-phone-case-twice mindset is a flavor of capitalism that I find pretty gross)- and while I will say the LIDAR stuff is actually fairly useless (the resolution rarely gets below, say, 1.5 inches), the apple "Object Capture" API that some apps are starting to implement seems really clever. My understanding is it saves some depth/gravity data along with the images to really help with the reconstruction process. I assume it's a glimpse of things to come over the next few months across the board, with any luck... All that said, over half the stuff in the above pack was made with reality capture, which is probably still the best for processing scans of a larger size (since you can dump as much data into it as you want).

Ian Hubert

this idea could help with the indoor scanning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JrqH2oOTK4&t=690s

Ian Letarte

I was proudly immune to the iPhone frenzy for years... and now I want my own pocket LIDAR 3D scanner really bad.

Pablo Nicolas

HAHA! yeah, it just becomes addictive at some point in life where we can't stop ourselves from using volumetrics.

I KNOW! I literally keep thinking I'm in eevee! It's unbelievable (although I immediately took those render times back to normal by deciding every scene now needs volumetrics :P)

Ian Hubert

Bro! I used cycles X and used your assets.... F*ckin Eevee speed in path tracing.!! Didn't knew your assets are so optimized for large-scale environment creation. LOVED THEM A LOT. JOD!!!!!!!!!

R U F-ing kidding me??? I've been doing a project for the last three months and could have used these instead of the crap I got off Sketchfab. You're a saint, man!

replying to this in case anyone jumps in with an answer...

Gehrig Campbell-Dempsey

You can stick an image texture in a spotlight and it acts like a real physical projector

Zeke Faust

You are a prince amongst paupers.

Jon Wake

These are incredible, Ian! Thank you so much! In your fourth example photo, it looks like a bunch of your characters are watching something projected on a wall? I've been wanting to learn how to do that for a while. Can you make a tutorial at some point? I'd love to know.

Steven Mertens

These are great, thanks for giving us the tools to easily build out worlds ourselves :)

Out of curiosity, what forts did you scan?

Nathan Blanchard

Thanks Ian! I've been scanning a ton of stuff lately too. It's new world!

Shawn Hawkinson

Wow, these are great! Thanks Ian, you rock!

These are awesome. I need to bring my army truck across the ferry so you can scan it.

Mark Miller

Thanks so much Ian!

Wow! Love the Turbo Kid vibe of these.

Mike L. Taylor

Thank you Ian! Now I'm in a 3D scan frenzy too :-). Polycam really makes it easy. Now I'm cleaning up the models with the techniques you shared. Just one question. Polycam gives you the color, normal and occlusion map. When you repaint the remeshed+reUVMapped version, is there a way to paint the 3 maps in sync? I mean, if I use your clone painting technique to grab a texture from another part of the model, is there a way to clone the normal/bump at the same time, from the same place? In some models the bump really adds to the realism. Thank you again. All your content is awesome!

Pablo Nicolas

G.O.A.T for a reason, they are sooo good!

Ian, One of many nuggets I got from you this month was that polycam adds occlusion and normal maps to the obj textures! so cool. (compared with a few other apps i’ve tried so far this looks most worth the modest cost. Question - do you use the obj output from polycam? (as opposed to fbx or another) thank Ian - the assets, as always, awesome and beautiful!

Chris Keller

awesome stuff, thank you so much Ian!!

Nik Kottmann

They're beautiful AND useful! Thanks Ian! <3

Stijn Windig

Father

Jared Soto

These are incredibly useful and informative, thanks Ian!

TW Stout

Great work man, thanks for these… looking forward to diving in

Thank you, these are great!

Jan van den Hemel

These are so good thank you Ian ily :D

Best. Patreon. Ever!

Lt. Leotard