Jeremiah Baker - 3D Scanned Object

scanned object

rapidworks screenshots (250K, 500, NURBS patch)

ghosted painted black (no naked edges)

render 1

render 2

render 3

Concept: A couple years ago, my parents went to Thailand on a mission trip, and brought back this hand carved elephant. It's been sitting on my desk ever since then. I thought a 3D scanned version would be pretty cool, and it would definitely have taken me many hours to model without the scanner.  I did end up going with a very low poly version of the scan, just because I think it looks cooler.
        I chose to use the grass field by the SU for my context because I thought it might look better if there was a sculpture or something to occupy the space.

Scanning Process: I scanned the carving twice, once from the side and once from the top, so I could get a full view of the object. Merging the two together was not difficult at all. It worked out that there weren't any holes at all when I brought it into RapidWorks, so all I had to do was a little smoothing. I started by making the NURBS patch, using the feature following option. It turned out pretty good, but did end up losing some of the detail. I then began to experiment with the poly-count on the mesh. The original mesh had around 250K polys. I started by dropping it to 2K, which still had too many, in my opinion, so I dropped it even further to 500 polys. That version looked pretty good, but I was curious, so I cut that in half. I thought the 250 poly version looked the best, so that's what I decided to use in my renders. I pulled that OBJ file into Rhino to check for naked edges (there were none), and then sent it to KeyShot.

Rendering Process: When taking my backdrop pictures, I was sure to get something a little in front of the object, so it would seem more real and actually in the space. I used the perspective match in KeyShot to make it look right, and then placed the elephant so it was facing the same direction in all the pictures to add another level of realism. I decided to use a procedural wood material because it fit the best with the scene and context, and had a cool scratch bump map effect on the object. It was difficult to get the lighting to match, and though it isn't quite perfect, I think I got pretty close. After rendering them out of KeyShot, I used Photoshop to put the foreground elements back in (the bushes and the pole covering the text), and added a grass mask at the base of the legs so they would blend better with the grass.