Scans from TC2 company

The TC2 company (http://www.tc2.com) does not advertize it, but they provide free anonymous scans of male and female subjects. To obtain them, download the software for the NX16 scanner (take the standalone version, you have a 30 days license).

In the 'Sample data' folder (where u installed the soft) you will find several .rbd files. Open one and test the software feature (e.g. data extraction). In order to get mesh out of the scans (.obj or .vrml) do "Batch process" in the menu, select all the files you want, and check "Save RBD as OBJ" ; wait a bit and here you are !

I will come back on this blog to inform you on my attemps to have MH automatically adjust a model to match body data from a NX16 scan.

Local topology

To model the local topology of the 3D scans we need to extract features associated to this topology.
Here is an exemple of such a feature : we measure the non-coplanarity of the neighbourhood for each vertex. White regions correspond to non-coplanar neighbourhood.

Automatic detection of keypoints for 3D reconstruction

I would like to find a way to automatically detect the keypoints used for alignement and interpolation when the mesh is adapted to fit 3D scans.

Since a lot of 3D scans have already been manually processed, we can learn a statistical model of these keypoints. Such a model would contain a part about the local topology for each keypoint and a part about relative positions between them.

Once the model is built, the solution should be the configuration of vertices having the maximum likelihood according to the model.

If this works, this should save a huge amount of time in the treatment of 3D scans...

MakeHair utility WIP

So here is the deal.. for reasons, that manuel can explain better than I.. we decided to have makehair preview hairs as quad-strips instead of bezier curve..

Some questions are posed on how the user is supposed to work with the whole hair modelling. For me (as it is easier to program, and I am just very very lazy) I thought of having a button "Preview Ribbons" that shows us the "ribbons" from a .hair file that we have loaded (loading however would show us curves) then when the user actually wants to model the hair manually he re-clicks preview Ribbons and that deletes all the ribbons and he can work with the curve-guides instead. Comments would be appreciated.

I havent shown to the public what the collision detector for hairs that I programmed could do.. I'll put it up in the next post (manuel asked me to put the work on collision detection on hold until after the coming new release). I personally think that the collision detection works fine enough for curves, the next step would be meshes (i.e. things like clothes).