A lot of projects that we do requires us to hand make all the assets that go into a 3D commercial. That requires us to use a lot of methods to imitate the real world object so it appears more life like and less like a 3D animation. But this can take a lot of time, especially if It's a high budget commercial that requires a lot of detail.

So we started exploring different ways of achieving photoreal results quicker. We found a method called  photogrammetry  where you take a lot of images of an object at different angles, and use special software to reconstruct a 3D object of it.

This was spiked our curiosity so we thought we'd experiment with that. The result is this Nike shoe video.

Here's what we did. In short, we took a running shoe and put it on a black canvas. We took over 500 images at 8K resolution. Rotating the shoe on a turnable table around 10-15 degrees each photo until a full 360 degrees was captured. We did this at various heights below and above the shoe.

Next, we edited the RAW images to provide the best data for the scanning software to feed on.

Once in the scanning software we told the software to calculate where all the cameras are in 3D space based on the images and their features. Then generate 3D points and create a mesh (3D geometry) out of those point positions.

Next we had to export that shoe for 3D animation. We setup various animation controllers to be able to bend the shoe in different ways and created something sleek and short.

We've since used this method to scan shoes and other objects that will tend to be in the background of scenes, saving time on creating them by hand.