I ended up starting this week’s assignment by re-doing my 3D scan, since the one I had done with a Kinect v2 last week turned out quite poor – decent mesh, but horrible textures. Bellus3D turned out much better, the texture resolution is high and the mesh has a lot of detail. There are still a few glitches – the texture on the nose looks stretched, there is no gap behind the ears, and most visibly the texture on the top & back of the head is inferred, rather than captured (the app only scans the front & side of your head, not the back.)
I then followed the Wrap3 tutorial in order to clean up my scan and attach it to a body. I didn’t realize Matt had sent the .wrap files over email, so I built the little script based on the video tutorial, but it was pretty easy.
I tried attaching my head to a Daz body (and to a Fuse body) in Maya. While combining the meshes – with some imperfections around the neck – wasn’t difficult, I don’t know Maya well enough to merge the textures & update the UVs. In theory I know I should combine the textures into a single file, add it to the scene, and move around the UV maps to match the single texture, but I didn’t manage to do it. I am also not sure whether this process would’ve produced good results when importing the new mesh in Wrap3…
As a next step, I did the mesh scaling, rotation and alignment in Maya.
I also exported a meshes from Wrap3 with a few different settings (compression parameter, export normals toggle.)
At the end, I uploaded my obj file to Mixamo, to make sure it can be rigged. It worked well. I also brought it into Unreal and applied the texture, for testing purposes, but didn’t document that part.
The big open question I have after this assignment is how can I attach my head to the body of an existing avatar? Also, Wrap3 seemd to decrease the mesh resolution of my head scan even at the lowest compression setting, but I assume it’s still high-res enough.