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As I've been moving more into VFX in my film career, I've also had the benefit of the tools I use for Virtual Production also being useful for MSFS Development.
Recently I met with a VFX artist who worked on Avatar 2, Godzilla vs Kong, Tranformers and others and we had a really good talk about the state of VFX and also simulation. He's a DCS user as well.
So as I've been working towards Virtual Production and Mandalorian style filming with LED walls, part of the process is utilizing Reality Capture to capture and render objects for use in movie production, but the cool thing is the same tools can be used for Flight Simulation and serious games development.
For years I've been wanting to build my home airport of YBAF, but I haven't been a modeler, however as an FAA and CASA licrensed drone pilot, and film cinematographer doors have started to open up for me, especially with photogrammetry. After visiting the Queensland Air Museum in Caloundra Australia, I saw some rocks with plaques on them that I knew I needed to scan and bring into MSFS as they would be too hard to model by hand manually.
So I went and snagged about 170+ photos per rock yesterday afternoon and about the same for the concrete wall and this morning set to work to build the 3D models. Now Blender is not so good at decimating models, but reality capture is. Within a short time I was able to go from about 40 million polygons down to 1000, and still retain as much of the geometry as possible. Any less than 1000 polys I’d lose the face plate details so I figured that was a good compromise.
Here’s some screenshots from start to almost finished, I'll add more screenshote tomorrow when I can snag them and drop them in here. But if you want to see the whole process feel free to watch the tutorial below.
For now, here's a not so short tutorial on how to generate high detail, low poly complex objects for MSFS and other simulation platforms.
Recently I met with a VFX artist who worked on Avatar 2, Godzilla vs Kong, Tranformers and others and we had a really good talk about the state of VFX and also simulation. He's a DCS user as well.
So as I've been working towards Virtual Production and Mandalorian style filming with LED walls, part of the process is utilizing Reality Capture to capture and render objects for use in movie production, but the cool thing is the same tools can be used for Flight Simulation and serious games development.
For years I've been wanting to build my home airport of YBAF, but I haven't been a modeler, however as an FAA and CASA licrensed drone pilot, and film cinematographer doors have started to open up for me, especially with photogrammetry. After visiting the Queensland Air Museum in Caloundra Australia, I saw some rocks with plaques on them that I knew I needed to scan and bring into MSFS as they would be too hard to model by hand manually.
So I went and snagged about 170+ photos per rock yesterday afternoon and about the same for the concrete wall and this morning set to work to build the 3D models. Now Blender is not so good at decimating models, but reality capture is. Within a short time I was able to go from about 40 million polygons down to 1000, and still retain as much of the geometry as possible. Any less than 1000 polys I’d lose the face plate details so I figured that was a good compromise.
Here’s some screenshots from start to almost finished, I'll add more screenshote tomorrow when I can snag them and drop them in here. But if you want to see the whole process feel free to watch the tutorial below.
For now, here's a not so short tutorial on how to generate high detail, low poly complex objects for MSFS and other simulation platforms.
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