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Karen Knight, our (former) local Northwest sales rep for Alias Wavefront, very kindly loaned me an eval copy of the new cloud data tool incorporated into Alias 8.0. |
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I just happen to have a set of cloud data. It took me four years to get it. |
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What happened is that when I was at Virgin Interactive and we were trying to decide if we should get Alias, our Southern California rep, Bill Vanek, arranged for me to get my face scanned by Cyberware. This was at an NAB show in Las Vegas. A guy named George was running the scanner. George claims to have saved every piece of data ever scanned. |
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Well, I was supposed to get the data so I could fool with it, but that never happened. I found out how to contact George, but it turned out he had moved to France! |
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After trading e-mails with George for - and I'm not kidding about this - three years! - he finally managed to dig up my data and send it to me. He sent me a nurbs model he created using their special software that reduces point clouds to nurbs or polys and the original data as well. |
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It was just about then that Alias announced this new tool and it read Cyberware scans directly! |
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So, I get the eval license, I load in my data, I apply the texture data (also captured during the scan) using a cylindrical projection map, and voila! It's me! |
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It literally took four years after getting after George every few months, and then the appearance of this cool software from Alias, for me to finally see my scan. |
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Here's what it looks like: |
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Original Cloud Data ... The Cyberware system scans about a zillion points (I don't know how many, but it's a lot). |
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Untextured version of my face ... This model had about 10,000 polygons in it. In real life I don't look anything like my brother Tom but without any texture in my face I look a lot like him. Very strange. |
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Is it live or Memorex? (It's Memorex.) This image was rendered by Alias using the face data (reduced to 2100 polygons) and then texture mapped.
Here's the same model (2100 polys) without the texture. Pretty blurry stuff. The texture makes all the difference. |
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The Alias Cloud Data tools let you chose the number of polygons to reduce the data to - for these examples I used about 2100 polygons. The upper limit is 100,000 polygons, but Alias has severe problems picking that many vertices (it takes forever) so I used the 2100 polygon version. I will say this about the Cloud Data tool - it's very fast. It only took a couple of seconds to create the polygonal geometry. |
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Finally, here's the wierdest thing - the original texture of my face before mapping it onto the polygons. |
