An Ultimate Photogrammetry Course With Blender & RealityCapture

A team of professional 3D Artists at Creative Shrimp, creators of 3D assets and online tutorials, has released what they believe to be the most full video course on photogrammetry out there.

Gleb Alexandrov and Aidy Burrows, both seasoned 3D Artists and enthusiasts will share years of experience with you in one complete package, over 12 hours of high-quality step-by-step tutorials, more than 80 videos, project files, and much more.

The authors note, that photogrammetry is an advanced technology and can be demanding in terms of hardware needed to capture the images and then having the computing power to process them.

These are the recommended requirements for enrolling in the course:

• An entry-level DSLR or a mirrorless camera or a smartphone to photoscan
• Basic photography knowledge
• Some familiarity with Blender's modeling tools, since a lot of clean-up work is done in Blender
• A small budget to buy the RealityCapture credits, as the time saved and accuracy gained will be worth it to take it to the next level
• At the time of release, an NVIDIA GPU card with a CUDA computing capability is required for the full operation of both RealityCapture and Meshroom

The course covers the entire photoscanning process from taking photos to seeing the finished 3D model with baked textures in Blender's viewport.

Chapter 1 starts with the best practices of photogrammetry that will help you to obtain the highest quality sources. How does the capturing device affect the final quality of the scan, what are the optimal camera settings and shooting patterns for every situation, and how to pre-process the RAW photos in the freely available software Darktable.

In Chapter 2 you will explore the basics of the photogrammetry pipeline in RealityCapture and Blender, with the source photos taken on an average phone – all the way to a production-quality 3D prop.

A showcase of an in-house scanning setup that uses a turntable and a controlled light for a full 360-degree model that's useable even without retopology:

Chapter 3 will guide you through the photogrammetry process using free and open-source Meshroom to get the same high-quality result as fast as possible.

As photogrammetry is not only about capturing objects but also about capturing 3D surfaces for texturing, you will get acquainted with the tileable PBR materials workflow in RealityCapture, Blender, and Gimp.

With heightmaps, you get access to more interesting and convincing ways to blend these surfaces. So in this chapter, you'll also be looking at how to mix 2.5D surfaces using their heightmaps in Blender.

In the advanced 3D environment assets workflow Chapter 4, you'll create a pack of modular 3D assets based on the raw scan of an abandoned building and learn how to:

• Organize large projects and pre-process the sources
• Extract the modular pieces out of the raw high-poly scan
• Rebuild, fix the holes, and restore the missing parts in Blender via sculpting and standard modeling
• Bake normals and displacement textures, de-light the albedo

Every part of the raw scan will be meticulously broken into modules like low-poly bricks with displacement, detachable and movable window frames, doors that can actually swing, the roof details from which any number of similar roofs can be assembled, and so on, for maximum versatility and realism, visualized in EEVEE or in Cycles.

Lastly, you will learn how to rebuild, reproject, and bake raw scans onto retopologized meshes using a fraction of the polygons with a range of manual and automated techniques.

The course comes with a couple of bonuses as well. The authors will show you how they combined the scans created during the course to build this atmospheric abandoned 3D demo environment in Blender:

Additionally, you will receive all the necessary project files: the source photos in different resolutions and the .blend files with textures. There's also a royalty-free pack of photoscanned Eastern European city props and ground textures that you can use in any of your own projects commercial or otherwise.

Finally, for the course students, there's a Discord chat and support channel where you can get feedback and share your scans with other photogrammetry artists.

The Photogrammetry Course: Photoreal 3D With Blender And RealityCapture course is available at Gumroad for $59.

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