Reflections of 3D Modelling

Choosing the Right Object

In making this 3D model, I think the most important thing is choosing a suitable object.

In the beginning, I spent five days repeatedly capturing some game-related objects, such as Xbox game controller, Nintendo switch and its game console, and a mini animation figure. But they all failed for a variety of reasons. For instance, the game controllers’ surface is too uniformed that the software cannot recognise its shape, or the figure cannot stand to hold a good position for me to do the capturing in a hemisphere. In these cases, alignment in the software cannot be done at all. As a result, I had no choice but to change to another object.

After repeated communication with the teacher and references to others’ success cases, I finally decided on a paper brick bought from The Palace Museum long ago. An object with intricate surface patterns can be easily recognised by the software (Figure 1).

 

Light and shadows

During the capturing process, several things should be taken into account.  First of all, light is quite essential, even though I did not use a lightbox, I should still provide sufficient light so that the object’s detail can be clearly captured. Secondly, avoiding shadows is critical. I need to ensure that the light is uniform so that shadows will not be casted on some angles of the object. Thirdly, while taking pictures, ‘deep’ depth of field should be avoided on the surface of the object. It will also cause trouble during the software’s alignment process.

After successfully capturing all the pictures in a hemisphere, I will need to add masks to each image before aligning them. However, this only applies to the situation where I rotate the object to capture the hemisphere. When I make sure the object does not move at all, it is my lens that rotates around the object and does the capturing, the adding masks process can be left out.

However, another issue under no-masks circumstances is that I do not have a bottom side to my object, so I can only use “close hole” to add an artificial bottom to the object. But there are always other solutions to the problem at different stages, and multiple ways to accomplish the same goal of finishing a 3D model.

In all, various issues can be encountered when working with the newly-learned software, however, communicating with others can always be a good solution.

 

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