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Check out our YouTube Tutorial on How to Make 3D Scans for Blender with Polycam!
Capturing Museum Objects With Polycam
Today we are on site at Oxford's Natural History Museum. I've gone outside, and we are going to be 3D scanning, 'cause I love 3D scanning objects. I can't be stopped. So what I do is I use a app called Polycam. You take a series of images of surrounding an object, and then it stitches them all together and it creates a 3D model of them. You can import that into Blender and do whatever you want with it. Um, I'm not sponsored by Polycam. I don't have any affiliation with them. I got the free trial, okay? And lots of other apps have the same functionality.
Recommended Number of Photos
So I take about 30 pictures. I find that that's sufficient. Sometimes if you do too much or too little, then it can't properly stitch them together. So we're gonna make some 3D models, and we're gonna compile them into a fun little poster inspired by the Natural History Museum.
Capturing the Scan
Once you open Polycam and you start using it, this is what it looks like. So I'm going around the object taking pictures in manual mode.
Manual vs. Automatic Capture
You can also use the automatic mode, which takes the pictures for you, but I just like the control of manual. So walk around, get the top, all of the sides, and as much as possible, and it doesn't have to be perfect if you don't get all of the angles here. I like the look of something that's a bit stitched together and looks like a 3D model, so I'm not trying to make it perfect.
Scanning Reflective Glass Cases
And this one was a bit tricky 'cause it has this glass case, which you'll see in the end kind of cropped out a bit. And then for this Darwin statue, I thought this was fully not gonna work because as you can see, I'm looking up at him, like I'm fully beneath the statue, but it actually turned out really well in the end. So I take about 30 pictures. Again, I'm not caring too much about it being perfect because I like the digital look, but it's up to you, and you can experiment with trying to do scans multiple times.
Challenges With Moving Subjects
But with sculptures and things that are still, it does tend to work out pretty well, but I've found that for moving objects or scanning people, that's when things can get really tricky.
Processing the Scan in Polycam
So just click Upload and Process, and then it uploads all the images, and it takes a couple minutes to process the model, but this is the Darwin statue. It actually turned out really, really well, and you can just move around and see it there.
Exporting the Scan
Now to download the, um, model, what you're gonna do is just go onto it and then click that top right. If you go to the formats, you can see how it goes with the software, but I chose the GLTF because it's free. Click Export, and then you're gonna get a zip file.
Importing the Scan Into Blender
Once you open that zip file on your computer, it's a GLB, so in Blender just go to Import, GLB, and find the file in your computer. And as you can see, I've got the dinosaur right here. It just imported just like that. It turned out really, really well, and it's got all of that great texturing of the dinosaur skin and everything. And this is just in Eevee. This isn't even Cycles, like the texture looks really, really nice.
Cleaning the Mesh Geometry
So from here, I just went ahead and went into X-ray mode and deleted all of these excess vertices, anything that I didn't want, 'cause of course it picks up a lot of this random stuff from the side.
Preparing the Animation Workflow
I'm turning these models into a moving poster, so there's two ways you can do this. The first one here is that you can render out each object separately, do the animations for that, and then compile them together in After Effects. That way you have a bit more control over how each of them are in the composition, um, when you're doing the typography and everything in the end.
Creating a Full Blender Composition
The second way is what I'm gonna do next, and that is getting all of the objects prepared and changing the camera ratio to an A4 size, and then I make the composition of the objects and just render it out as one big animation. Then I'm gonna go into After Effects after and do the typography and all of the designing. When all that was done, I took my video into After Effects, and I wanted it to be on a loop, so I just copy and pasted the video and reversed the second one so it went back and forth. And finally, I went in on making the actual design, um, all of this just doing it in After Effects. After going off and finishing things up, this is the final moving poster outcome. This was a lot of fun to make, so I hope you guys enjoyed it, and I'm gonna go now.