Lidar Workflow
Many years ago, on a set, I was introduced to Lidar scene scanning, it blew my mind, and needless to say, it stuck with me. It blew my mind how the Lidar camera would spin, and within minutes you’d have an accurate point cloud of the entire location once in the pipeline; this improved and significantly sped up the tracking process. Compositing was swift, and CG assets could be placed accurately within the 3D point cloud. Fast forward a few years, and I was still thinking about lidar scanning, but I couldn’t use it with my business as I couldn’t pass the cost saving on to clients; it still needed a Hollywood budget to make it work.
Fast forward to this week, I've been working on a Lot of look dev recently, and with the start of the school summer holidays, I thought id attempt to leave the kids in the woods with the lovely lady in the gingerbread house and try some workflow methods within the pine woods. Needless to say, I couldn’t carry much kit whilst working. I still needed to watch the kids (the lady in the gingerbread house turned out to be a witch, and I wasn’t comfortable leaving them there knowing that).
Mirrorless camera in hand, I produced a 1670MB HDRI using the DJI Ronin RS2, later sampled down to a usable 8K. Then the most significant penny drop occurred; on my phone, I had the Pix4Dcatch app, which has been sitting there for ages. I constantly neglected the small device in my pocket as lidar. I quickly scanned a large area using the app on my phone; you can upload the data to a cloud server, I already own Metashape, so I processed the data through that. As soon as the app has finished, you have an instant point cloud; the mesh it produces is quite good. Unlike the lidar models from many years earlier, this mesh cannot be used within renders, but it's fantastic for scene set-up, contact geo, catching shadow, and help tracking. It's finally a Lidar workflow; we’ll be able to pass on the savings to clients; it took a while, but it's worth it. These renders are far from perfect, but the method is excellent for rapid turnaround look dev.
