Miller's Cows (Heavily Eroded Sandstone)3D Model
Miller's Cows (Heavily Eroded Sandstone)
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Triangles: 800.3k
Vertices: 400k
More model information- This is an entry into the 3DF Zephyr 2020 Worldcup competion, round #2. The rules are no outside editing or fixing, so any minor issues you see would otherwise be easily painted out.
At the end of Miller’s Canyon (Central Utah), just across the highway, is a huge plateau of yellow sandstone sitting on top of incredibly fluffy blue-gray sediment. Sometimes a block of sandstone will break off and roll down the soft slopes and end up out in the flats. Over a thousand years these huge blocks will weather and decompose into amazing shapes. These rocks are called “Miller’s Cows”. Some are as big as a bus, but these have eroded to almost nothing– just the bones of the cow.
Here’s a large cow: https://i.imgur.com/w0hFOch.jpg And here are the cow skeletons from this mesh from 2 years ago: https://i.imgur.com/nyErRJe.jpg (Has it changed?)
CC AttributionCreative Commons Attribution
Sep 10th 2020
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1 comment
The photography was difficult on this project-- I lost my race with the sun and it came out 3/4ths of the way through the capture process and I had to switch to automatic exposure. That had to be fixed in Nikon's RAW software, which was a little time consuming! 494 images were taken, and all but 5 were accepted by Zephyr's camera matching-- The rejects were some iffy images of the back-sides of weeds, so no big deal) No image masking was used.
The point cloud was very clean and I only needed to trim for the oval shape.
My first run at mesh creation had a few pin-holes where the sandstone gets paper thin, so I tried the new "thickness" option in the custom/experimental settings and it worked like a charm! Even WITHOUT photo-consistency turned on, I got a nearly 6 million triangle mesh. At this point I cloned and decimated the mesh down to 800K triangles for use in sketchfab. No editing of the mesh was necessary. If I had a 40K mesh like my last entry I may have manually created UVs for it, but I decided to let zephyr handle it this time, and I cant complain.
An 8K texture was projected on the decimated mesh. Thank goodness Zephyr can handle iffy images for color matching, since some of the photos didn't quite match due to the sun coming out (My adjustment attempts weren't totally perfect, but I did my best). With so many up-close images you'd expect more of a problem, but it looks good to me, other than the bigger rock is a bit over exposed. I then adjusted the mesh to be flat to the ground plane and exported as obj.
In Sketchfab, I adjusted the lights and gave it a touch of post effect saturation. Normally I'd just photoshop the texture but the contest has rules about that kind of edit. I sometimes will build the mesh with images that are bright and easy for Zephyr to match points, and then re-adjust the raw files and export new jpgs with adjustments made with color and beauty in mind. With 500 images though, I decided to just try for more beauty with post FX and it mostly works. The last touch was using the color texture for a bump map to give it a little zazz and its done!