Making a Skater Boy out of a Photoscan

Hey! I know this is an old video but when you mentioned “getting a full tree photo scan is the holy grail” it had me thinking “I wonder if a cheap drone would be the best way to video a whole tree and convert to jpegs.” I live in Florida we don’t have trees, but maybe it’s helpful for you. Love your content

Joey Williams

Where can we get a copy of your Royal Bengal Tiger as a reference?

Clarence _

Hey, just became a subscriber here. can you point me to the specific tutorial you mentioned loving?

Austin

Can't you do exactly that, bake and then texture paint on top? You could also use multiple copies of the image texture, each with their own paint strokes, but that seems less fun and more complicated.

Carter Burr-Kirven

please close some of your tabs

Hey Ian, my friend and I both subscribed to your patreon after seeing how you project jpegs on to any object. It was a mega revolutionary game changing experience! hahaha now we are constantly looking at things around us and taking weird photos of the most random ordinary objects. Really appreciate a tutorial with some life in it too, thanks for making it actually fun to learn hahah. Anyway we have a question! After projecting from view from various angles how do you then texture paint on top without it janking up other areas where you used the same photo to project. We are trying to figure out some way of baking and then texture painting on top.. maybe your black magic powers of blender have already discovered a workaround for this.

Pausing this video just to say that I really appreciate your content. It's not only informative but also humorous because of your awesome personality. Keeps me engaged and inspired to make content like this someday. are you willing to take a video idea? Could you please showcase different ways of creating cities. Thank you. I'm going back to finish the rest of the video lol. :)

This is are the best tutorials ever. They are funny to watch. Ian is an amazing problem solver. Best subscription ever.

Are you doing your photoscans in 4K?

Douglas Steele

I'm still scared of trying to figure out how to make a bird fly, but pigeon flight is so fast/erratic that it might not be as hard as I think?? I want to give it a shot! That'd make a good tutorial, yeah!

Ian Hubert

Gotta say, would love to see a tut on the pigeon that's been showing up on your Instagram! Bonus points for a flying animation, but I'll take what I can get!

Thank you for this video <3

I don't know if anyone's said this, but you can actually plug videos directly into RealityCapture. It'll give you a dialog box to convert it to an image sequence.

Chromfell

Thanks!

bluefire

Here I think this video gets into it a bit better (although I still want to make a video for Total Beginners soon here) https://www.patreon.com/posts/getting-into-40975941

Ian Hubert

You TOTALLY should!! My favorite thing I've learned in the past 6 months!

Ian Hubert

Oh man watching this really makes me want to learn IK, it looks like so much fun to play around with

I've tried! And I'm going to try again! But the big issue is photoscanning doesn't work well with 1.) dense occlusions or 2.) projecting textures on very thin areas. The dense pine needles or leaves of a tree really throw off the tracker, which is basically expecting to find "points on a surface". So a clump of pine needles might work as a tracking point for a few frames, but then the occlusions and all that change, and at BEST you end up with a series of blobs in the same general shape as the original branch. It's almost impossible to get that fractal "branch splits to small branch splits to smaller branches splits to twigs until it's a complicated mess of positive/negative space" feeling that really defines a tree. I've had a BIT of luck with very basic foliage-less trees, and I suspect there are things I could do different to get better results, but until we get clever AIs on the job, I don't think we're going to be able to get great tree scans... That said, I'm talking a bit out of my butt- I should probably do a google search and see if other people have had luck- maybe it's totally doable and I just didn't get enough coverage (the few times I tried were also on breezy days, which ABSOLUTELY didn't help) [okay, having done that, it seems to back it up; a LOT of very nice photoscanned tree trunks, combined with some sort of particle system foliage that hides the top of the tree]

Ian Hubert

Ian can't you photoscan a tree with a drone??

Greg Beaudry

Ahahaha, it's mine, yeah- after having the song stuck in my head for a few days I was hoping that would help get it out of my system.

Ian Hubert

Yeah, with my Sony A73, just shooting footage :). And since I'm just exporting an image sequence, it doesn't really have an inherent framerate, BUT, I'm in a 24fps timeline, and I'm speeding up the footage by 400% or so, so it's only exporting every 4th frame :)

Ian Hubert

HAH!! Yes! I can't believe I couldn't remember, "It's... it's just something wacky!"

Ian Hubert

Oh cool! Yeah I think that would work? I'm not totally sure how important having a trackable background is for camera positioning- but I suspect that would be a great idea for doing scans!

Ian Hubert

I totally lost it at 32:37

Kai Christensen

Man... these videos make my day.

Doug Brown

Is it easier to use those photography soft box that people use to take pictures of commercial products for photoscanning? that would get me a lot of nice even light, but I would have a constant plain white background. I'm thinking of scanning some plushies and stick them in some simulations, I think that would be very fun

bluefire

Ian! Is this version of sk8ter Boi yours or it's a cover of a cover? Because damn! It's awesome!

Gabriel Benício

Keyboards and Skateboards BOTH are board based! Also oh man yeah! So many good skateboard videos floating around! I mostly watched the ones of folks doing absurdly fast downhill deals (since I didn't wanna animate feeeeeeet), but now YouTube thinks I want to watch skateboarding and it's great.

Ian Hubert

Ahh thanks you! Will do man keep rocking on 🎸

There's a ton! Apparently iPhones are getting some really powerful tools so you can scan right in your phone (and there are other phone-based options, too, though I haven't seen partiiiicularly good results from them?)- but I use a desktop based program called RealityCapture, which works really well, but costs a bit of money per scan. Meshroom's another good option (and free!) I talk about using it in the second link in the description above). Let me know how it goes!

Ian Hubert

Great video! Is there an app for photoscans? I would love to try this on some mates!

Watching you work while talking at us is just down right entertaining. Always makes my day! Also, cool board man. Also, I ended up going down a youtube rabbit hole about skating because of this. Instead of studying Japanese. And it's all your fault. Although in retrospect, I probably could have made that a Japanese youtube rabbit hole. Also, the e key on my laptop keyboard broke. So I had to buy keyboard here in Japan. So now I have a keyboard with a Japanese layout... and I keep making typos. Well, more than usual, anyway. This is the most relevant comment *ever*.

Nathan Vegdahl

I should definitely spend more time on the discord- but there's a render challenge??

Ian Hubert

Hey Ian! If you can DO the ik tutorial it'll be very very helpful! it looks very very cool!!!

Have some me time with your render challenge for the discord >_<

Felicia White

Hey Ian, how are you shooting the footage to run through reality capture? Through your regular camera? Also when outputting what frame rate are you using?

Fes

It's goofy footed! Also, I snowboard! Also, this is great as always! Also-

Blake Rizzo

Oh weird! Thanks for the heads up. I'll check it out when I'm back at a proper computer!

Ian Hubert

Ian for some weird reason the video cannot be viewed on patreon, it says something like it has something that blocks it and can only be view direct on youtube. Not a problem, obviously but I thought you might like to know that (or maybe a weird bug that only I had)

Ahahaha, I almost didn't catch the reference and was kicking myself for not explaining IK well enough again.

Ian Hubert

Laughing out loud 3 minutes 50 seconds in at Tom's volcano head. 🤣🤣

Fes

HEY HEY! That's FANTASTIC! Thanks for that!

Ian Hubert

Having trouble following this video...Why'd you have to go and make things so complicated? :D (Great video and great scan result)

This is amazing Ian thanks for sharing! I have also been making my own hoverboard with a jet engine attached to it haha. This is just what I needed to get some good animations for the skaterboy!!!

If you know what boolean operation you want to do, you can use ctrl+shift+minus/plus and it will apply the modifier and delete the other boolean object for you :)

Zachary Macintyre

Thank you lots of "wish I had discovered this earlier" accelerated learning here for me!

German Bauer

Yeah that makes a lot of sense! It looks like keeping the brush super low opacity and really just taking time adding in the highlights might be a really good way of going about it, too. I love being able to just paint straight on the model (especially when combined with stencils- could be a great way to add T-shirt designs and such)

Ian Hubert

With hair, I find that it's best to start with the dark and then bring in the lighter shade afterwards, so you're not trying to brush shadow underneath your first colour, if that makes sense. I mean, this is how I paint it at least!

Lewis Turner

Gotcha! Maybe I'll make a follow-up video for this shot, just going over raw-render-to-finished-image. It's basically what I covered in the after effects compositing video, but it could be nice to see it in other contexts, yeah :D

Ian Hubert

One thing that I'd love to see in the future is more about how you finish your videos. I loved the after effects composting video but it would be amazing to see more detail about what goes into some of these scenes (E. G. How you export from blender and what else goes into giving your videos a final look)

Thank you! Oh man, I wanted to see how you did this so badly.