Rapid model creation using a webcam

[Columbus]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEOmzjIm ... r_embedded

This is some seriously AWESOME shit.
Think, how much easier this will make modeling some things, like features n' shit...

[bartvbl]

/me takes out scissors and paper and starts making a tank
...AWESOME!

[KDR_11k]

Those things don't tend to create models that are useful ingame. Even laser scanners don't. Remember EA bragging about its "proprietary face scan technology"? It involved getting a laser scan of the face, seeing that the result sucks and having an employee make it by hand instead.

[knorke]

It looks impressive (I saw a similiar video where they just walked around a car to scan/model it) but I too do not think its very usefull for games.
What might be more usefull is to laserscan landscapes, for example racetracks. iRacing and Live for Speed do that:
http://www.lfs.net/?page=rockingham
The middle screenshots show the point cloud created by the scanning and the points are later connected by the modeler or whatever, so it appearently is still a lot of work...

It also reminds me of that Warcraft like RTS where they fotographed clay models of everything. Don't know if they ever finished it (?)

[TradeMark]

lol looks like shit, plus very unoptimal for a game or anything polygon sensitive application

[SinbadEV]

this example looks like shit but there is no reason to believe that the future of this kind of technology is very promising... I just don't get why we don't get bi-optic solutions... it seems that that would be much more useful (two simultaneous views from slightly different perspectives... you know, like human eyes)

[knorke]

the real lol will be when you can do game logic and physics this way.
like play with a toycar in front of the camera and it transforms your messing around into tractionvalues for the tyres etc.

[Caydr]

I can see where this would be useful for a novelty, like letting someone scan their face to use in a game or something. Something suitably low-detail and easy to track that comes to mind would be scanning stuff built with lego and making a game with that, but honestly I think you could just model it faster.

Modeling isn't hard or especially time consuming once you've done it a while. Texturing is harder, but any texture you could get from scanning with a webcam would be crap.

So, yeah, maybe a killer feature for an MMO or something. All the ugly people would claim they don't have a webcam, and you'd pretend to believe them, but inside you'd be like, "Ok, where's all the unfugly ladies at? Daddy needs a new trophy wife!"

[Sheekel]

My work at Queen'sU Imaging over the past 7 months involved using point clouds for game models. Triangulated meshes generated by algorithms are messy and not usable ingame, so despite scanning the entire campus and obtaining many millions of centimetre-accurate measurements, I still had to digitize the point clouds by hand in a modeling software package.

At this point it is useful for visualization and prototyping, but as far as generating ingame models there still a ways to go.

As a side note, the Warcraft III mod we made using the models is a finalist at the SGSC next week, wish me luck! I'm pushing my boss to move to an open-source engine next year (spring ftw).

[Teutooni]

Looks really awesome, I'm surprised it's that accurate. Give it time.

I'm no expert but I'd guess with some kind of shape abstraction layer the shape recognition output could be turned into useful polygons (i.e. not messy).

[TradeMark]

dude... you cant make detailed models with this crap, unless you buy 50mpix camera.

or just use the damn laser... which probably is much cheaper vs quality.