External Inner-city Fly-through Techniques?

[marcjames]

Hi all,

 

This is a question regarding a hypothetical project - how would you go about creating a high-quality external 90 second fly-through of an inner-city commercial project?

 

As I see it I have a few options;

 

- 3D rendered / composited/camera mapped main building over HD footage (it is important to show the project in context). Several shots, photoreal etc...

 

- All 3D/CG. This would avoid needing HD drone footage and the technical hurdles of the above option. This would then involve a lot of modelling, which itself may be time consuming and not allow for full photo-realistic rendering when polycounts etc... need to be taken into account and render-time/costs would be large.

 

- Game Engine; a well-modelled, textured scene where the render time is cut to a minimum but the render quality may be lessened. This way the viewer can control their own fly-through and even implement VR if the client is that way inclined.

 

Any pro's/cons that you would need to consider?

 

(Tried to post in Tips/techniques forum but would not let me - mods please move!)

[Chris MacDonald]

Can you get to site to photograph it? If you can, I would suggest 3D modelling it.

 

Photograph every building that is going to be in shot flat on, then map the textures on to a basic model of the building using a UV unwrap. It can be a bit of an arduous task but the beauty of it is that you'll have a full 3D environment, so motion blur, reflections, etc will all be spot on.

 

I had to do some stills a while back and thought the surrounding (industrial) buildings might be in quite a few shots, so ended up modelling them based on their footprints on an OS plan and simply eyeballing them on google maps. The textures were grabbed from cgtextures...

 

 

As you can see from the screenshots, they're all incredibly low poly (except the tyre one, where the logo accounts for the vast majority of the polygons) and if you were travelling past them in an animation you wouldn't notice any lack of detail.

 

Mind you, my view is biased because I think I'd struggle with camera matching footage from a moving drone, something that will require some heavy duty camera tracking software like pftrack/boujou syntheyes? And another thing to take into account is how many buildings actually need modelling? Do you have any OS plans, or survey data to help?

Edited January 28, 2015 by Macker

[marcjames]

Thanks for your reply.

 

I run a small team and we would be outsourcing camera tracking skills if we decided to go the drone route so I agree with you - this seems the most efficient option in terms of time/resources & taking pictures of the site is not a problem. This still leaves the option of the game-engine, however, and I do wonder whether the benefits of the freedom/speed of rendering a fly-through of the game-engine out-weigh the lack of quality in the render itself.

[Chris MacDonald]

Not to mention that you'd have to have the model highly optimized to run in a game engine, and unwrap everything to bake light maps.

[Nic H]

you would be crazy to do the game engine route. have you ever done it before? why let people fly around everywhere ? it means you would have to model and texture everything.

 

id comp cg building into tracked footage. syntheyes is affordable and easy to learn. it will look good and is the cheapest and fastest option.