Art Spotlight: Banoffee

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I’m Romain, 26 years old, and I graduated in 2014 from an engineering school. Although my education was focused more on mechanics and electronics, I’m a 3D lover. I started in that field with the creation of mods for video games. Six years ago, I stumbled upon photogrammetry when I was asked to retro engineer a car seat for a school project. I was blown away by the result I could get with standard photography. So I dig through a lot of forums, softwares, cameras to improve my skills.

The idea for this piece is not really new; I was impressed by the demo from Timeslice but I didn’t have the time to do 4D.

But since I’ve won a lot of 3D scanning challenges, the Sketchfab team is bored, so I knew I would need to do something special for this one (the food challenge), something that hadn’t been done before.

To win, you could choose something very complex or something delicious. I went for both. ^^

So, I presented the project to my colleague (an awesome cook) at Allegorithmic and he got the idea for the recipe! Something tasty and easy to do, a Banoffee!

It was just a quick after work project, so we wanted to keep it simple.

A turntable with graduation in a lightbox:

Then experimenting on what to use for the base, in order to align all the scans quickly.

Finally we went for the cutting board.

We decided on 28 steps and 18 pictures per step.

All the images were aligned inside Reality Capture. Although the subject was modified because we had added some new ingredients, the cutting board featured enough details so that it allowed us to align all the 504 images in one component. This is quite a mess in your sparse point cloud but if you activate only the camera needed for each step, you can reconstruct step-by-step and have all your scans registered at the same position.

The next step is to simplify this in order to make it low poly for the mobile experience.

I went for a decimation inside Capturing Reality and another one inside Zbrush for cleaning the cutting board and then running a decimation master on top of every scan.

Small tips before decimation: just do some mask by AO, or peaks and valleys, that will help retain some small details.

Only the really flat parts were decimated and all the small details were retained. Then we exported every scan from Zbrush to Reality Capture to texture the low poly mesh previously done in Zbrush.
Afterwards we had to find a way to animate it.

To this end, I used Blender to rotate the model and smooth normals of each mesh.

Finally, for the animation, I found help on Sketchfab. The timeframe method was what I was looking for.

As mentioned above, the Sketchfab viewer allows you to make stop motion natively just by adding a .txt during the upload. So simple!!

This was also an experiment for VR, so having recently upgraded my smartphone application, I was able to display the “3D video” directly in my kitchen and show it to my friends.

The fact that you can upload your own background (drawn by the chef Mikael) was also very useful to put that recipe in context.

If you want to see some old stuff I’ve done or chat with me, go over here or check out this video 😉

Btw thank you Sketchfab for the art spotlight and keep up the good work 😉

About the author

Romain

The Scanning Machine



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