Photogrammetry!

Hey, Geril here.

The last blog post got lost somehow – I wrote it, sent it to Lussy and it got lost somewhere.

Anyway, this month I started doing more photogrammetry, messing around with mobile software and such. The results are varied, and it needs work before it can be used in any kind of project, but it's still fun to work on a library of photogrammetry assets.

Another piece of news is that we're going to Japan, for the second time! We're going sometime in early July, so we'll get another chance to thrift for stuff - mostly videogames and other digital media.

Otherwise, we try to work on our own projects whenever we can, but most of our time is still occupied by our jobs and our preparation for moving: arranging home renovations, sorting through stuff, that kind of thing.

2023!

We got through probably the hardest year of our lives so far.

Many things happened that made our lives difficult; we're moving soon and we're working on a different project now.

We're also dipping our toes into motion capture – full body, not just facial capture. So working on personal projects became somewhat hard, we rarely have time do it (again – or rather, still).

What Geril is messing around with nowadays is the iPhone app RealityScan, that creates photogrammetry in semi-real time. You basically have to take several photos of your target from all angles, and as you're taking the pictures, you can see the app building the 3D asset in AR. It can use up to 200 pictures – that you have to take inside the app –, and it uploads those to its cloud server. Making a preview can take some time, and you can only export the result into Sketchfab.

We used to upload some of our projects to Sketchfab, so we're familiar with the platform (for whatever reason, we have 4.7k followers). After the Sketchfab export, it's fairly easy to download the mesh and the two textures.

I shot a few (hundred) photos at our family Christmas, so I can share my grandmother's Christmas cookies with everybody. There's also a wooden hawk and a wall that is in a very bad shape.

We hope that we can show you something interesting this year, that we can be more active. Also, we hope that you all had happy holidays and will have a happy New Year!

Burnout.

Hey! Geril here.

Well, these few months were quite a struggle to get through.

We crunched, and burned out like dried leaf set on fire. The project we're working on got an update and we've had to work a lot on it to get it to the finish line. We got a little bit of a break afterwards so we've been sorting out all the stuff we put away because of work. One of these things were the blogposts.

So what happened with us outside of work? Not much. Really, we concentrated on work so much we didn't have time for other things. 

In the last week, I learnt photogrammetry, what is basically a bunch of photos of an object taken from different angles and pulled through a photogrammetry software - I used Meshroom. Of course it's not that easy, because the result is noisy, super high-res and at a weird angle, but I can just fix those issues in Blender and bake the hi-res mesh onto a relatively low-res mesh.

After a few tries I realized that this works best with food and natural shapes, not with precise geometrical ones, so I mostly just made food-scans, removed the plate or bowl and baked the rest to a lower res version of the photogrammetry mesh, then put it back on a plate or bowl. (he is basically photographing everything before eating, and he takes a LOT more photos than your average Instagram food blogger - Lussy)

It's fun, I also baked a normal map and a few support masks – roughness and AO – so it looks pretty nice in my opinion. For optimization reasons I also made several LOD levels for the mesh, too.

Right now it doesn't have a purpose, or any plans with it, I just wanted to learn how to do it.

Also, Lussy gave me my birthday gift early this year, I got a Twin Famicom from her! It's an awesome system, a combo of the Famicom and its Disk System. I love it.

We also have a Metroid disk for it, and it runs much smoother than the PAL NES version we also have. So we're collecting Famicom and Famicom Disk games now. It's getting really hard to find a good way to store our games. We're planning to buy more shelves, but without a car it's hard to get them home.

Oh well. 

We hope that from now on we'll have more free time. We're not sure right now, but maybe.