
The Visual Revolution of the Vanishing of Ethan Carter - SuperChihuahua
http://www.theastronauts.com/2014/03/visual-revolution-vanishing-ethan-carter/
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mattip
You should certainly be proud of this work, it it beautiful. But be careful of
patent-protected feature detectors like SIFT, you could get burnt[0] There are
alternatives that perform as well, also mentioned in the link

[0][http://dsp.stackexchange.com/questions/1288/what-are-some-
fr...](http://dsp.stackexchange.com/questions/1288/what-are-some-free-
alternatives-to-sift-surf-that-can-be-used-in-commercial-app)

~~~
ygra
I'm fairly sure you need to pay licensing costs if you include the algorithms
in the application you ship. Not if you used the algorithms in other programs
(you purchased, perhaps) to build your assets for the game.

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bsenftner
Photogrammetry is very common in film VFX, where I was first exposed to it
nearly a decade ago. There is a very interesting technical merger taking place
between photogrammetry, computer vision, and machine learning. My company,
www.3D-Avatar-Store.com, is one such company where we've trained neural nets
to perform the entire complicated photogrammetry process, and then relax it's
technical constraints, allowing for less than ideal source imagery. This
"technical merger" is creating neural nets that "know" a given class of
object, and are able to reconstruct them given less than complete information.
This is achieved by training the neural nets to already know about their class
of object, enabling them to "recognize" when presented with one, and then fill
in the missing information not present in the limited source photo(s).

At the 3D Avatar Store we've trained our neural nets to reconstruct human
faces and heads. It is a photogrammetry process deep inside, but 95% of the
process described by Andrzej Poznanski is automated. There is a manual step
where one approves and/or corrects the identified facial feature outlines
while generating an initial 3D reconstruction. Because we use a facial
recognition neural net as a starting analysis, the jawline is hard to recover
accurately (facial recognition ignores jawlines). So we have a "post
reconstruction" series of deformation tools to allow the user to fine tune or
exaggerate their reconstructed 3D form.

[https://3d-avatar-store.com/A-peek-at-new-Fuse3DAvatars](https://3d-avatar-
store.com/A-peek-at-new-Fuse3DAvatars)

And the best part of a process like this is all "3D Avatars" created by our
process share the same topology: meaning they can be morphed between one
another and controlled by the same animation rigs.

I love this "Visual Revolution of..." blog post. People need to know about
photogrammetry, and the advances around it.

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teamonkey
The implications for this tech isn't more realistic objects but on team size
(we're more limited by memory/fill rate/load times/bandwidth/storage
limitations than our ability to accurately recreate an object).

I don't know if they outsourced any of this work but their company consists of
8 people. Compare that to a AAA team that might have, say, 10-20 dedicated
artists working flat-out for a couple of years.

~~~
con-templative
My artist friend didn't seem too worried by it. I have no idea if this is
common in the industry, but he was saying that much of the artwork is already
outsourced to cheaper foreign artists.

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hartror
Don't miss the amazing webgl examples towards the end.

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abritishguy
I only bought this game because of the stunning visuals and boy is it
stunning. This write up is very informative.

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lsaferite
This looks like the same tech that was used by the Smithsonian to scan Obama.
[http://dpo.si.edu/blog/smithsonian-creates-first-
ever-3d-pre...](http://dpo.si.edu/blog/smithsonian-creates-first-
ever-3d-presidential-portrait)

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beagle3
Daniel Cremers group has been producing something complementary to what is
described here - See their LSD-SLAM demo here
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GnuQzP3gty4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GnuQzP3gty4)

Source is available.

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sctb
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8387310](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8387310)

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_almosnow
The Visual Revolution of the Vanishing of Ethan Carter... is just another
product from Agisoft.

