The Journey of the Shukanimator

& sometimes cousin Mike

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Moving this blog over to Instagram. Come along for the ride...

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Working on a super-detailed track of a long 4K shot (3555 frames) for a short film. This is by far the longest, highest res track that I’ve ever done. It’s taking a while to run...

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Ugolino and His Sons by omegadarling on Sketchfab

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Point clouds can be beautiful. Also, this old NYC emergency call box is pretty cool too.

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This render is taking many days, and I’m not as disappointed with it as I was on the first day. Here’s a frame with a bit o’ color grading and I’m digging the slick almost painterly look.

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My first car render in a long time and I wish I could have spent a solid two days just making the light and materials. Unfortunately, I only had a few hours because it’s a quick turnaround job. I had to get this thing rendering pretty quickly because I need to render 1435 frames at 2K and I’m rendering it all on my workstation. No online render farming for this one. I do plan to do a little cleanup and spice-up in After Effects, though.

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Finally the weather is starting to get nice enough for outdoor photoscans! That’s why everyone gets excited about the spring, right?

Anyway, one thing I realized as I was walking around was that I really wasn’t finding much I wanted to scan in my neighborhood. Fortunately, I found this amazing lamp at the Audubon Society building in Prospect Park. The top part is going to need some renovation in Zbrush, but the base is really fun.

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All kinds of new things going on here. We’re testing out the Scanistand (standard size) as well as polarizing filters. Seems like the combination of the filters as well as the 50mm prime lens is getting much better results with mildly shiny objects as compared to the 24-70mm lens without polarizing filters. The big downside of the scanistand is that we really don’t get great results with the bottoms of objects, but maybe it’s worth it for how much easier it is to work with than our suspension system.

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Testing out the Scanistand pattern and method without the actual stand (Henry’s printing one for me). However, I’m hitting some snags with the concept of scanning the top and bottom by flipping the object. Not sure if Reality Capture has the option to automatically assign half the photos to one point cloud and the other half to a second point cloud. Then the idea is to cut out the turntable points in each point cloud before merging the top and bottom clouds into one and then meshing. I know this is something that can be done in Photoscan, so maybe there’s a way to do it in RealityCapture. We’ll see...

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Here’s a part (the rest hidden to obscure what it is) of a cool flaming metal part I created in Substance Painter, rendered in Octane for C4D, and composited in Photoshop. I’m really digging Substance and really need to learn more about it because I’m pretty sure I’m not using it as efficiently as I could be.

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I’ve been doing so much scanning, I thought I’d use one of the scans to do some other kind of art. Here’s the beginning of my banana-based sketch.

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My 1 year old son is a great 3D-scanning assistant - this could really turn into a family business since cousin Mike has already been my first assistant.

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Banana Bunch by omegadarling on Sketchfab

I got sidetracked from finishing the shiny shoe and made these lovely bananas. These are my lowest polygon posting to Sketchfab yet.

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All kinds of new stuff is happening in our scanning R&D. Talc spray (a custom mixture) and the Foldio360 (an automated turntable that IR triggers the camera as it turns). The turntable is amazing so far - shot 6 things with it already; it just simplifies the shooting so much that we actually were able to watch a movie in 3-minute increments while the shoot automatically happened. The one downside is that the IR beam gets blocked by our suspension contraption. We tried a mirror to bounce the beam out into the camera and that works for 4 out of 5 of the shooting angles, but the highest angle can’t be reached (yet). However, even without the auto-trigger, it’s still automatically turning the table at perfect increments, so that’s a big back saver (it gets painful to turn the table manually for hours). My review of the talc spray - not sure yet how well it works, but it’s a bit messy and perhaps a little hazardous to breathe in. Also, I may need a dark equivalent for spraying onto white surfaces.

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I’m finally caught up, posting everything we’ve shot to Sketchfab. This is a major accomplishment! Now I have to get everything up on Turbosquid and CGTrader so we can make some money selling these suckas...

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Mike and I have been kicking butt on the photos and first couple of steps of the scanning work, but I’ve been lagging on the work I have to put in to post everything to Sketchfab and other places that I can show and sell our scans. Enter: Producer Zach, to producerize myself, check off boxes, and get shit done!

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Tactical Glove by omegadarling on Sketchfab