A rocky field environment made using photogrammetry only
After experimenting with photogrammetry for a while on my own time, I felt that I’d built a solid workflow and was ready to take on a bigger project.
So, I set out to the wild and spent 4 days taking thousands of pictures of an environment. For rocks and more complex objects, I took as many pictures as I could from all angles possible. For photogrammetry, it’s important to have an even and diffused lighting when scanning, otherwise shadows and sunlight will be “baked into” the final model.
Therefore, it’s the best to scan in overcast and dry weather. Since this location was far away and my schedule was tight, that was a luxury I could not afford. Instead, I processed illumination maps for each model scanned that I could use to reconstruct the lighting scenario in post and remove hard shadows and direct sunlight from the models.
To do this, I noted down the orientation of each object scanned and quickly captured a HDRi for all of them using the chrome ball method. Ground surfaces were scanned as a 2.5D heightfield.
Foliage was scanned using Substance’s muti-angle material scanning method, and then modeled in Maya.
The final environment was then assembled in Unreal Engine 4.
