DV Info Net - Photosculpt 3D Textures

Dear all,

I wanted to share some experiments I've just done, using Photosculpt textures in 3D Studio Max to create objects that have bitmapped materials, but also which emulate the 3D texture of the original object. The Photosculpt software works on a stereoscopic premise: you take a 2D picture of an object, and then another picture from 20 degrees off-axis. Feed the two pix into the Photosculpt software, and it creates tile-able textures for 3D CG programs. I'm used to using bitmaps for the "diffuse" channel (the main image channel in a material), but Photosculpt also creates bitmaps for the ambient, bump, specular and displacement (depth) channels, as well, so that the final texture emulates the actual 3D bas relief of the image that was photographed.

At least, that's the theory. I've been playing around with it, and my results aren't, of course, exactly what the site suggests (partially, I think, because they use v-ray to render their final samples). Nonetheless, I see this as a very exciting possibility. With CG, it's easy to create and control stereo, but the real world is much more interesting when it comes to texture and detail. This allows me to bring real-world textures into my documentary's fake-world environments. I think this is going to be especially useful for text, like the samples above.

Hopefully this is useful to some of you who create in CG, as well as with a camera. If anyone already has experience with Photosculpt, I'd love to hear it, and maybe you can help me dial the settings in better. All the textures were free sample downloads from their site, but I'm eager to buy the software, and start creating my own. The people in the scenes are a scientist and a philosopher that I interviewed in front of greenscreen for the doc. The tile scenes were my first attempt at creating my own depth map (in Photoshop).

Check out the software at photosculpt.net.