With halloween around the corner I thought this year it would be fun to do a little festive project, one that involves photogrammetry and pumpkins. The first stage of the project would be to capture some reference. To source some pumpkins I could have cheated and gone to the shop, but instead we went to a local farm and picked some ourselves. It turned out to be a good decision because they had a much better selection than the standard orange supermarket type. I tried to get the most varied selection I could, all different shapes in a variety of colours.
Capture
This is the camera setup I have been using for my handheld capture over the past few years. It does a pretty good job of flat lighting the subject and has polarising gels and filter over the speedlites and camera lens, so I can capture cross polarised photos which create pretty cool colour maps with no specular reflectance to them.
Below you can see the difference between cross polarised and parallel polarisation. Cross polarised photos are ideal for creating flat albedo colour maps for 3D models. Cross polarised lighting removes all the specular reflectance and parallel enhances it. The parallel images are great for surface detail reference. You can also calculate the difference between the two images and generate a specular map – something I am yet to play with, but have seen some cool results out there. The only issue is that the specular appears different from every angle, so I’m not sure you could project it onto your 3D model and get a usable map. Maybe I will have to test it out on one of these scans at a later stage.
For the capture setup I used a tripod and balanced the pumpkins on four wired prongs to allow me to capture the underside as well. This approach was a fairly successful, apart from one casualty which resulted in the biggest pumpkin exploding on the concrete floor. Unfortunately this was one of my favourites – I was looking forward to calving a face into it. On the plus side I managed to capture some good data before the accident, so all was not lost.
See below a time lapse of the shoot.
Look Dev
For the look dev I used two lighting setups; one for the turntables and another for the collection renders. I decided to test out the awesome prop look dev scene from Cave Academy. It has a nice infinity curve to it and some great mesh lights on real scale lighting stands. The real scale aspect of the scene is very useful as it makes you think more like a photographer, which I think steers you towards creating more realistic lighting setups. See below the pumpkins setup in the Cave Academy look dev scene.
Arranging pumpkins in any kind of interesting way is surprisingly difficult. They are all fairly similar in shape and despite some really cool coloured texture, they are mostly just orange with a bit of green. Despite all this, I am pretty happy with how the collection turned out together in the scene. It actually made me feel inspired to have a go at doing some kind of still life CG ‘photography’ project… before I get too excited, let’s stay focused on the pumpkins for now.
See below turntables of all six pumpkin assets.
Next Steps – Halloween Themed Project
I will keep the next stage of the project a bit of a surprise, partly cos I haven’t made a final decision on the exact direction I want to go. What I am sure of is that it will involve at least one of these pumpkins and I will be looking at turning it into a CG character of some kind. I’ve been trying to set myself a goal to learn something new with each personal project. On this occasion I would like to have another go at Marvellous Designer and try to create some quick clothing to go with the pumpkin character. For the concept I will base it quite closely on an existing piece of artwork to save time on the concepting stage. Hopefully I will be able to adapt it with my own ideas as the project develops. Usually I take forever to finish personal projects, so I decided it would be good to give myself just 3-4 days and see what I can get done in that short space of time. If all goes to plan I will be sharing the final artwork on halloween, keep an eye out for updates on here, or on social media.
For anyone else interested in doing some halloween pumpkin related artwork; all six of the scans I have captured for this project are now available to purchase on my website store – click here.