3D research

What with us getting a 3D printer and an Oculus rift and all, I figured now is as good a time as any to do a bit of research into the mysterious (to me anyway!) world of 3D modelling.

For the last few weeks, I have been looking into options for 3D scanning and 3D modelling software, investigating the options and finding out what we need to know to start creating models for printing, importing into Unity 3D experiences for Oculus Rift, and also for use with the Aurasma augmented reality app on iOS. This post is a quick summary of some of the things we have done and found out.



Quickly Creating 3D models

As Dave mentioned we have been looking at 123D's impressive suite of apps for creating content on the ipad. The 123D creature app in particular is a fantastic way to quickly and easily create great looking content which can easily be exported out as an .obj file and imported into Unity3D (or any other 3D software for that matter)

This abstract creature was made by one of the youngest learners at the self managed learning college within 2 minutes of seeing the app for the first time. It is definitely quick and easy.

Another good accessible entry point for creating 3D printable models is Doodle3D :

 
Doodle3D, makes 3D printing very easy from Rick Companje on Vimeo.

It is a wifi box that lets you create and send 3D models dirently from your ipad to your 3D printer. We saw Ivan Pope using it at a busy event a couple of months ago and in a situation where you don't have time or the ability to sit down at a computer, and want to give somebody a taste of the power of 3D printing, it looks great.


3D scanning existing objects :


I will go into more depth in another post about this in a seperate post, but I have also been experimenting with Autodesk's 123D catch software, which can automatically create 3D models from a series of photos.

I have been using it to try and capture some toy hacks, with mixed results. You can see all the models that I have created at :

http://www.123dapp.com/Project/Toy-Hacks/2513998


It is very easy to create models, and the colour and detail in the textures on some of them look really great. but the 3D models that it gives you are :

 - very complicated  - (millions of polygons)
 - noisy, bumpy and innacurate - (even more pronounced on small objects like toys)
 - often full of holes - (not good for 3D printing)
 - nearly always come with multiple texture maps  -  (no good for importing them into game engines and apps like Aurasma)

In short it is a lot of work to clean them up and make them anywhere near usable for a 3D printer or a game engine. I spent quite a lot of time feeling rather confused trying to make sense of all the funky 3D lingo (apparently I had to decimate my model, retopologize it and make some new UV maps...)

After many (many, many...!) failed attempts, I finally got a decent version of this smurf done.





The textures that 123D catch spits out are a huge mess though. Getting them to even appear on your model in the right way is a very long winded process, and projecting those textures onto a simplified version of the model is something that I still haven't had a lot of success with.



In the end I had to settle for keeping my sanity, giving up on Zbrush for now, and only having single colour cross dressing VR smurfs in Unity3D... (sometimes life is about compromise) Here they are in the Oculus Rift "Tuscany" demo.

I did also manage to get the Oculus rift working in TouchDesigner, and import some models, although haven't had time to investigate much further than that.

 Anyways, we have the Structure Sensor device on it's way to us extremely soon, and it looks like that will make getting nice clean, well textured models a hell of a lot easier and simpler.

In the next few posts I will go into detail on my research into using the Aurasma app for making Augmented Reality content, and creating animated 3D models to use in it.

IdentiToy