Photogrammetry with a Puppy for all seasons, and other 3D content

As you may have seen in Rachel’s post about her hospital stay, we’ve had an eventful month of October. While technically that situation started at the end of September, it bled over into this month, so I’m counting it. Luckily, most of the outcomes of that situation have been positive, and we’ve been able to travel again (to Menorca), and Rachel is back to her normal distance running self. Oddly enough, on the very same day that Rachel was admitted to the ICU, I published an app, Juego de la Rana. The timing was not by design, but as I mention in one of my recent LinkedIn posts, it seems fitting that an app that I wrote as somewhat of a tribute to Basque culture, appeared on the App Store on the same day that the Basque hospital system saved Rachel’s life.

On the technical side of things, I’ve been continuing to improve my 3D design skillset, and have recently created a new photogrammetry page, and putting some of my models on Sketchfab. As you can see in the graphic above, La Rana features prominently in a 3D rendering and animation that I created today. You can also check out the full resolution video on YouTube, embedded below.

Of course, the main character in the animation is Puppy, my favorite subject of my photogrammetry hobby over the past year. In this blog post, I’ll talk more about the newest version of the Puppy model.

Puppy at the Guggenheim – August 2024

What makes Puppy unique is the real flowers that make up his fur coat. Because these are living flowers, they change with the season. In my original Puppy model, I had captured his appearance in March when most of the flower’s had not yet bloomed, and therefore his coat was much greener in appearance. In August, those flowers had bloomed to a much more vibrant variety of reds, blues, whites, purples, yellows, and oranges.

Trying to Reach the Top

A challenge that I’ve alluded to in prior posts is that Puppy is around 30 feet tall. To get a high quality photogrammetry model, generally it is necessary to view the object from all angles, meaning i would want at least a few pictures from above. Unfortunately, I don’t have a drone or access to any of the surrounding buildings. In this case, I tried to compensate by getting a better angle for some “far-away” shots, where I climbed up ramps and on top of benches to get as high as I reasonably could.

After processing the set of sixty photos I gathered that day, the “raw” output of the photogrammetry script looked as below. As you can see, I’m able to fill in some of the color on the top of his head, but there are still regions that are either smeared or missing entirely. No worries, as with before I filled in these regions using the Blender clone tool, where at least having a bit more resolution high on his head helped to guide my texture placements.

The final result of my efforts (not including the animation bit) are included in the model that I’ve posted to SketchFab. You can see the cleanup on the top of the head, as well as the pedestal that I added.

Wrapping up

Returning to the video I posted at the top of the post, there I combined my new Puppy model with my La Rana from about the same time, and added on features from there. The ground plane is includes a texture reminiscent of the tiles used to pave many of the sidewalks in Bilbao, where I used the material generator on PolyCam, along with one of my own photos, to create the texture and normal/displacement maps.

The lights surrounding the models in the animation are created by adding a cube mesh, scaling one side to make them partially pyramid-shaped, insetting the opposite side to make it concave, setting the material to be reflective and metallic, then placing a point light inside. Finally, I added fog, and animated the camera to fly around the models, and rendered the video you saw at the top.

I’ve also been updating the model of the “El Triangulo” setting for Juego de la Rana, which you can play yourself on the App Store. In my version, the buildings are a bit shorter, and there’s a lot less going on, but I’m gradually working on adding detail.

A lot of 3D design stuff for me over the past few weeks. I hope you’ll keep visiting to see more of my digital creations!