Go-Anywhere 3D Capture
If you can get a person there, we can model There.
Accurate models are useful, but experiencing the unsurpassed photorealism in our work will drop your jaw. You’ll believe you’re there right
Here.
Demos
These “flatties” give you an idea, but contact us for a live 3D demo.
Gothic Chair
From a scanning perspective, this Gothic chair with its intricate carvings and many through holes poses a challenge to any scanning methodology. Only Photo2Topo makes possible this level of photorealism.
Brick Kiln
Evergreen Brick Works in Toronto served as a location for a test shoot for Canadian art photographer, Ed Burtynsky. The ability to work in highly shadowed and completely light-denied environments like this kiln is a hallmark of Photo2Topo’s proprietary capture system.
Mining Machine
An American-made mining machine about 1000′ down the Uralkali potash mine near Berezniki, Russia. To catch the upper sections, this Mad Max-looking machine was captured in a space with higher ceilings, then later composited with a section of tunnel. Virtual cinematography developed for Ed Burtynsky’s film trilogy, Anthropocene: The Human Epoch.
Antique Table
This carved dining table features four types of wood, the grain unique to each brought to life with a pseudo form of scan-based specular maps, the shiny property. Full scan-based speculars are in the pipeline.
Cave – Formation Room
Purists will perceive this scene as surreal and unnatural. Note, natural underground = pitch black. Animated “stage lighting effects” point to the power of mutable lighting when working with Photo2Topo digital assets. This smaller room joins a much larger model produced for the Edwards Aquifer Authority, a 3D virtual cave tour used in public outreach.
Lunch Spot
Surrounded by psychedelic color and shapes, Russian miners break for bagels and coffee at this welded bench table. 8K texture maps allow you to read the Russian newspaper used as tablecloth, if you know Cyrillic. The many tools lying about, the dial telephone, an oasis of things human in an otherwise otherworldly environment.
Hi-Res
Pushing the limits of resolution (geometry and color) with assets that render in realtime, there’s actually 200% and more info in the source data than being tapped here to resolve the tiny type on the spines of LPs and a CD collection. Fidelity = Realism. Photo2Topo can scale to most any need.
Cave – Pit
Ever rappelled down a pit? Nobody has ever been free to fly around a pit(virtually)to explore until now. Access to high-angle and otherwise highly inaccessible locations opens up a world of possibility to virtual tourism, engineering, education, you name it.
The Good Tunnel
Two techs really pushed it seeing how much tunnel could be captured in a long day in what client, art photographer Ed Burtynsky, dubbed “The Good Tunnel”, as this section of Uralkali featured a stretch of amazing metamorphic carnalite. The new workflow invited a datagap or two, but productivity tripled and much was learned.
Cave – Big Room
Hands down the most challenging space to bring into an accurate model was this large chamber featuring a steeply sloped mud bank beneath 35′ high cupolas and highly occluded stone shelves, alcoves, and jumble of alluvium washed in by the monstrous flooding that takes place here.
Cave – Sump
Dear 2,000,000 inhabitants of the Edwards Aquifer, this is where your water comes from. The EAA’s immersive 3d virtual tour begins in daylight near the pit entrance and ends here — the sump — the beginning of the Edwards Aquifer.
Uralkali Junction
Judging by the powdery piles of mine tailings, our capture team planted the first footprints here, the first to really see it. Two miners locked inside a confined cabin in the mining machine can’t really see out, too much dust, they excavate and leave. With virtual lighting the user sees even more.
Services
Turnkey or Stand Alone
3D Capture
Hi-fidelity virtual worlds begin with reflected light in the real world converted to pristine scan data.
Scene Reconstruction
Source scan data enters a workflow pipeline delivering textured models for offline and realtime rendering.
Game Development
Entertain, educate, or research with video games and serious games.
Consulting
Information design for education modules and exhibits, ideas guiding display technology.
Photo2Topo is here to revolutionize digitizing Place. It is to CG art today as the invention of the camera was to the 1830s, a time when likenesses of people and landscapes fell to (expensive) painters. Once again, art is on the move.
Our virtual environments serve a great variety of applications, each telling a different story. All stories begin with establishing the basic; Where are we? When are we? Who are we? Establishing the Where — no matter how inaccessible, historically sensitive, or dangerous — is now possible with Photo2Topo’s patented capture technology. Source data is pushed through a pipeline to produce textured, high-resolution models, then moved into 3D animation tools and gaming development software to flesh out content for film, video games, serious games, and virtual reality.
A wave of all things Reality Capture is in motion. Scans of objects and entire landscapes are old hat. Until now, the texture information provided by photogrammetry has been limited to what’s possible with ambient lighting, with advanced studio lighting, and with labor-intensive post-processing. Until now, there’s been no efficient means to deliver the delit photography required in offline renderers and real time game engines to unleash the power of dynamic CG lighting, much less to achieve this within the source data in a go-anywhere capture system.
Deeply layered technology feeds a pipeline transforming capture data into believable worlds from a distance. When we’ve all done our job (we being the many tool makers and skilled tool users we partner with), there’s true magic when at last the technology disappears to the experience.
