You must fix the source of the content..

So it might seem like a quick fix to scale and orient scans after the fact. Dirty and cheap I say. You must fix the scans at the source of the process. In Agisoft Photoscan (if that’s what you use) Agisoft Photoscan processing scans arbitrarily in world space and to a random scale and position. Not noticeable at first but a pain in the arse during production. There are no built in tools (yet) to solve this problem but you can solve it using the Region Box and Python Scripts. I have the scripts for this, email me if you want them.

First Problem. Scale.

You will need Agisoft Photoscan Pro and I urge any serious developers who make a living from Agisoft Photoscan to purchase a Pro license. It helps Agisoft LLC and it helps the community.

Here is what we see after a 109x DSLR single shot scan that has been processed (on High) and exported to 3DSMax

Poor scanned girl is the size of a thimble and laying on her side! “not good!” says Client X

As we can see in Agisoft Photoscan, it tells us the orientation is wildly off in some random direction compared to x,y,z and it’s position could be anything to 0,0,0 center of world co-ordinates.

See the culprit! bottom right, it tells us its drunken state!

So let’s fix that.

You go into each photograph that has your scale calibration visible and place two markers, one at 0 cm and the other at 1 cm. You could use pencil or pen marks of two dots that have been measured. Whatever. Just some reference points we know are the correct scale in the scene, that are visible from more than 3 x camera positions. So we can refine marker position.

Next up, lets measure the varmints.

Drag from 0 to 1 markers to define the red line scale.

Next up hard set the scale to 1.0 = 1cm!

Now lets update that MOTHER!

Correct scale accomplished!

Still with me? good.

The other alternative, or as I like to call it “chicken before the egg : |” you could append in an already scaled and aligned file. But do you have one? this is why it is VERY important to make sure you ALWAYS use the same naming convention for your single shot camera array. But that’s for another post “How to correctly use XX control Software for Remote Multi-thethering” I will post later.

Alternative!

Appending the egg!.. or.. the chicken?

Another girl scan! (yeah, it’s a hard life)

So we can use this appended chunk to align all cameras by camera. Align by camera is a very cool feature (that IR got introduced into Agisoft Photoscan, one of many, shared Beta testing! no NDA b&^^%^&s) As I mentioned it will only work if your cameras are always named the same. Organization is key. Naming conventions like IMG0007.jpg are no good.

So we can append align, if we already have a correctly scaled and oriented previous file. Or for every session or client we can make damn sure each master scan for the whole set, is correctly aligned, scaled, oriented and positioned correctly in world space.

Ready for export.

You only ever have to do this once per scan session because you can align the others by that chunk using align by camera (if you take 100′s of scans) and as long as you don’t drastically move cameras or rename mid session (are you CRAZY!) this is also where a tethered camera system is very important, none of the wireless nonsense. As going wireless looks all pretty, flowery and pink but it’s not practical in a reality. As you must not touch cameras during a session!! let alone all the dropouts and issues associated with wireless. Oh and changing batteries every 5 minutes!!

Back to previous process

SO.. after we have scaled the scene, if we can’t append the egg/chicken we can use the Region bounding box and a python script to do the hard work (props to Alexey and Dmitry for this method)

It helps to alter to View: Perspective/Orthographic and turn on/off cameras whilst adjusting your region box correctly. The goal is get it the right way around. Red panel on the top, dash along the +x axis. This will give us the correct x,y,z orientation. The region box center is where the world center 0,0,0 will be.

I also find it’s wise to duplicate your chunk, decimate it and then you can use your script to orient and position that first, and keep the HIGH scans as backup.

Decimate down (we don’t need textures for this purpose)

Happy with the region box position? we then run the “magic script”

PS090_coordinates_to_bounding_box_rotate.py

BOOM! BOOM! double BOOM! all done.

Well you could tweak some more. Lets test the scale, orientation and position in a 3rd party application again.

Not bad but her center point is off slightly. Let’s correct that. Back to Agisoft Photoscan once more..

Adjust..

Run the script again. That should do it!

Now if you wanted you could use this chunk to align all other chunks by camera positions!

Now lets check the final results in 3DSMax (or whatever your 3d artistry desires)

1.695m of pure 3D athletic goodness..

That’s all you need to know for now. This is the hard code fix.

Hopefully in the future this will be an obsolete post and Agisoft will have a fix or natural flow for how to correctly scale a scene. I did post in their forums about this http://www.agisoft.ru/forum/index.php?topic=592.0 but because of the lack of developer beta testing support it can be hard to get new features integrated without backup by user numbers.

Join the cause!

If you use Agisoft Photoscan, please contribute in the forums. You know who you are, especially the larger studios.

There are amazing benefits to properly beta testing the software and also helping to fund the developers by buying the PRO license version. Support them.. support us all..

For example IR was able to use the brand new Mosaic Texture algorithm back in June-July 2012 for some very high profile projects, while other companies were still stuck on the Average (god awful blurry!) texture method, until the fix was released in February 2013.

The more you contribute, the more early access you can get.

IR has helped Agisoft Photoscan improve, helping to beta test and suggest features such as:

Difference Masking

4D Support on timeline

Mosaic Texture Method. Super sharp highly detailed, blur free, seam free, textures (this took months of testing, uploading GB’s of data)

Strip Depth Maps, Strip Textures, Strip Models, Strip Masks command

New Spherical Texture Mapping Method for 360 faces, distortion free.

UV Viewer.

.FBX and .DAE exporter refinement for use in applications like Mudbox

A lot of Batch commands that never existed.

Alignment by marker and Camera

a multitude of Python Scripts

But to do this, to make this software grow and evolve you have to put in the time and effort, write out detailed ideas, posts, emails, blog posts, share images and share data freely with the developers.

If any of these features have helped you. If they help your business, please come over to the Agisoft Forums and contribute. Help the community, help others who make a living from scanning, to improve the software. We are contributing to the same cause. Better, more lifelike digital humans.

http://www.agisoft.ru/forum/

I hope this Blog post might be of some use (duck and dive around the grammatical errors!).

Thanks. Lee

So back to the post title, “Private Limited Company, Accounting, VAT Registration and Cash-flow” BORING!! …..right? What’s that got to do with Scanning!!

…as it turns out a great deal.

I registered Infinite-Realities back in 2007, along with IR-Entertainment Ltd in early 2009, there was a trade over of company articles in 2009 due to a name change and new formation.

This now means IR now have over 4 years worth of valid (profitable) accounts which has many added benefits when it comes to seeking investment or expanding the company in the future. Ideal for leasing agreements, loans etc.

Some good reasons as to why you might want to be a Private company limited by shares in the UK:

Convert your business to a Private Limited Company

If you’re a sole trader or partnership, there’s no better time to convert your business to a Private limited company. Here are four reasons why:

1. The principal benefit of trading as a limited company has always been the limited liability bestowed upon the company’s officers and shareholders. As a sole trader or other non-limited business, personal assets are at risk in the event of failure of the business, but this is not the case for a limited company. As long as this business is operated legally and within the terms of the Companies Act, directors’ or shareholders’ personal assets are not at risk in the event of a winding up or receivership. And as often happens on occasion, such events are not always under our own control.

2. The first £10,000 of a limited company’s profits are tax free. This is not the case for sole traders and partnerships.

3. Company profits may be distributed as dividends to shareholders. Presently, National Insurance is not applicable to dividend payments, effectively reducing your tax liability still further.

4. Operating as a limited company often gives suppliers and customers a sense of confidence in a business. Quite often, larger organizations in particular will prefer not to deal with non-limited businesses.

To get there and to run a legitimate company I’ve found you have to keep things lean (no big wages or bonuses. YET) and make sure everything is done by the book. Including registering for VAT if your company is earning over at least £70k a year, which I would hope it is if you are trying to be successful. Registering for VAT allows you to claim back on any VAT made on purchases, Bonus! and making sure you charge clients VAT following the appropriate rules across certain borders. i.e.

1. no VAT to customers or businesses outside of the EU.

2. Zero rated VAT for business in the EU (whilst declaring each company’s VAT number you do business with each month)

3. added VAT for individual customers in the EU.

4. In the UK VAT all round!

..it can get quite complicated, especially if you run an online store, as the VAT calculation has to adhere to strict rules. Otherwise HMRC might come knocking on your door! so fore warning on that. Remember do things by the book.

Back in 2009 I got some great advice from my uncle (as fate would have it, my uncle is an accountant who helps businesses and companies) he helped show me the correct way to manage cash flow using a simple formula.

These numbers are fictional but apply to any large or small business:

This is all you need to know, as to how to run a successful business. Money in, Money out. Make sure it tally’s to your business account every month and you cannot go wrong. It also allows you to predict months in advance how to make your cash flow, where to invest when to upgrade, when not to!! the key obviously is. Money in! once you suss that, the rest flows like water.

Again, these numbers are fictional but show the basic calculations:

I really recommend finding a good accountant as well as a loyal and trustworthy book keeper. IR purchases allot of equipment, lots of invoices, bills etc Having a good book keeper helps you tally invoices each month. Using an accounting application called Sage keeps everything in order and safe. Keep copies of records and invoices, ready for the day you might be due a VAT or accounts inspection by the dreaded HMRC!! I’ve already had 1x VAT inspection and trust me, that gets you sweating. But again, if you do things by the book you’re relatively safe!

So far 2013 has been IR’s most profitable year, I think in part to careful book keeping and growing slowly. Spending money wisely, investing in the future and not blowing wages and dividends on fast cars or a crazy lifestyle.

I hope the above cash-flow sheet strategy might be of use to someone, as I have found it to be so powerful you could run most large businesses or banks using that method. It really works and is the main reason IR is alive and functional today after 4 years.

I used to be terrible with money and accounting but now, I make sure my accounts tally to the penny. Every month!

Turnover is vanity. Profit is sanity. Cash is reality.

Capturing humans in motion, to scan, is one of the hardest things technically to do. Impossible to laser scan, and just as hard to do passively with DSLR cameras. Occlusion is always an issue but this system covers most angles. Even still, noise is present and a great deal of clean up is required. At the moment things like fingers, toes and hair can be problematic but with customers support, by purchasing content on triplegangers.com and by giving feedback, it will enable me to slowly improve the system, over time. This approach to 3D scanning is the first of it’s kind. It certainly beats building characters from scratch using 2d reference from Google!

A forum will also open soon, opening up discussion on the products, future requests and anything 3d scanning related.

Some examples from the store:

Athena³ – The goddess of wisdom, warfare, battle strategy, heroic endeavour, handicrafts and reason.

Aphrodite³ – The goddess of love, beauty and desire.

Odysseus³ – a hero and king of Ithaca.

I’ve been fascinated with VR since my childhood, constantly searching and hoping for something to arrive that was worth using. With the debacle that was the 90′s and 00′s with hardly any new kind of innovation apart from corporate milking of dodgy headsets and over priced displays, finally someone has arrived to champion the revolution and bring it to the masses, in the form of a hackable kit! Palmer doesn’t seem to be doing this alone either with the support of some amazing industry veterans, like John Carmack, Cliff Bleszinski, Michael Abrash and Gabe Newell!

Personally I’m not so interested in it for gaming but for using it as a developer and artist to build virtual worlds and virtual characters.

If this is something that interests you why not back the campaign, and spread the word.

The online store has just had a revamp this week, re-designed and ready to distribute allot of 3D scan data to the online digital artist community. IR plans to sell a myriad of digital content of various types of people with many different body shapes and ethnicity. There are also plans to open a small forum so customers and users can leave comments, show how they are using the data in their work and also place requests for future models. I’m interested to see how much of a demand there is and how much people would be willing to pay for such reference data.

The scans are useful to view subjects from 360 degrees, as study material, also useful for Conceptual Art, Previz, Character Previz, Architecural Renderings, Digital Double’s for background shots, or reference for the Games and VFX industry. Soon IR will scan models in Military Uniforms, Combat Gear and Various other costumes to study cloth folding, fabric interactions and how hard surface objects interact in movement and posture.

These are ideal anatomy tools for any artists to work with, in 2D or 3D and all in brilliant techni-colour, at Gigapixel resolutions.

Some early examples of the type of data that will be available, hot off the 3D digital molding press, still needs to be trimmed and cleaned.

Details from an Ultra scan:

Standard Reference Poses:

Body Action Coding System (BACS)

..yes I just made that up!

This could be a good opportunity to build a new database structure and an efficient way to store human movement to analyze. I would love anyone’s input with regards to this. Perhaps research institutes might like to combine ideas or seek data to test with? I’m always interested in collaborations.

Unlike older laser scanners; this system can capture much more subtle body movements, like skin wrinkling, muscle flexing, tendon movements, fat movements etc

Captured mid-motion:

Demonstration video of colour capture and Clothing tests:

[youtube width="480" height="320"]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ULCDPKGF10[/youtube]
.

Another post will follow next week, giving away some FREE sample data.

Platige Image have a wealth of experience and a show case of amazing short films and advertising experience. A really fantastic company, with a large talent pool of artists. It was a pleasure to meet them and they kindly gave me permission to show some of the quick test scans we did at the studio so they could evaluate the Single Shot 3D Body Scanning system, and to think of ways to integrate the pipeline into their own studio back in Poland as well as replicating a system there.

Cool guys and thanks Tomek for allowing me to post these!

Back in 2002 as a young 3D Environment Artist I could only have ever dreamed of owning my own ‘Laser’ Scanning System. I had no Character Artist Experience, ZBrush was just a 2D painting tool. I was in debt and had no business. But in 2007 that all changed …starting my own business was a gamble but also a fortunate move, it opened up new doors to things I had never imagined.

My point.. if you keep trying you can achieve bigger and better things.

IR’s Custom Built Capture System

The system boasts 70x DSLR Canon Cameras. It’s a Single Shot system from a full 360 Degree Array. Not only can the system capture a single moment in time instantly but it offers over 1,260 MP’s of colour texture resolution.

So in this blog post I wanted to show off some example captures (at the bottom) but first I wanted to explain (visually) why this system is better than previous scanning solutions. Of course all of them have their benefits and weaknesses. Times are changing and even this system in a few years will be out dated, but for now there is still time for it to reign.

There are now other systems springing up around the World. I’ve seen data from a system in Europe and 2 in the UK.

“So what are the benefits of IR’s Capture system?”

Here is a simple set of animated pictograms to explain why:

Old Scanning Solutions
.

IR’s Solution

You think of a Pose, IR can capture it. Mid flight! It also has a built in Face Capture System.
No manual alignment. No stitching. No seams. No Distortion or Registration issues. Minimal Post Processing.

Too good to be true?

The only draw back to this system is, it isn’t Mobile.

“Isn’t it expensive?”

The system is vastly cheaper than any structured light or Cyber Scanning systems on the market, and it uses all off the shelf hardware and software, available to the general public. People are asking how much I have sunk into this system, well 50% less than if I had invested in a commercial solution. Do the maths, 70x DSLR’s and Lenses, 70 Mounts,  280 Wires. Multiple PC’s. All this ….and still cheaper.

Conclusion

The 3D scan captures below, are only possible thanks to the hard work from the guys behind the processing software at AgiSoft LLC, who created Agisoft Photoscan that I use to process the 2D images. The whole process is very easy to set-up and use, with a little ingenuity and drive it’s possible to get this all working in unison.

Thus, contrary to popular belief and sales marketing, you don’t need a PhD to design or use a capture system like this. Cracking The Black Box of Photogrammetry Scanning.

Some example 3D Scans

IR’s solution is extremely reliable, comprising of 42 Canon DSLR’s networked over 5 PC’s, using Breeze Software to trigger and download with Agisoft Photoscan Pro to build.

The scanning system is able to capture a single moment in time, within a bounding box volume of about 1.5m x 1.5m x 2m Heigh. Allowing for lots of dynamic poses! The Cameras are synchronized so you can capture very quickly and at super high resolution.

Video showing the Models inside ZBrush4R3, retopologized and with Unwrapped UV’s, displaying 8K Colour Texture Maps
[vimeo width="600" height="400"]http://vimeo.com/40602544[/vimeo]
IR’s Single Shot 3D Body Scanning Solution is ideal for Game Development Studios and Visual Effects Companies who need to clone humans into Digital Form.

Various angles viewed in ZBrush 4R3:

…more poses, costumes and beauty shots to come.

This new Studio Space is “The Light Room” (all White) there is also “The Dark Room” (all Black) for sound proofed 3D/4D dedicated Face Capture.

Female Model booked for the 16th for a full 360 Degree single shot test run! Fingers crossed the 56 Cameras 42 Cameras work!

**Update**

They worked but I need moooiirree!! another 20 to be precise. I am praying to the #Canon Gods daily.