How i scanned an entire mountain range | MY AERIAL PHOTOGRAMMETRY WORKFLOW

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In today's video, i'm rock climbing a mountain and 3D scanning the entire thing from the top. I'll be guiding you through my aerial photogrammetry process, breaking down important tips for you while scanning on-location, and running you through the entire post process in Reality Capture. We'll go over stitching our data set together, meshing our point cloud, and baking hi-res textures to a simplified mesh. And in the end, we'll view our final scans in Unreal Engine 5 after buildilng a customizable master material. So gear up, and let's get scanning!
CHAPTERS:
00:00 Intro
00:33 What is Photogrammetry?
01:33 Aerial Scanning Tips
03:57 Photoscanning a Mountain!
06:31 Intro to Reality Capture
07:55 Processing our Images in Lightroom
10:15 Aligning our Images in Reality Capture
12:47 Meshing our Point Cloud
15:25 Cleaning our Mesh
16:54 Texturing our Mesh
18:35 Simplifying our Mesh
19:28 Unwrapping our Simplified Mesh
20:10 Texture Reprojection
21:16 Export
22:39 Importing our Scan into Unreal Engine 5
24:01 Creating a Customizable Master Material
30:02 Final Results
REFERENCES:
3D Scanning Basics: • The Ultimate Guide to ...
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[@quinncarlson640]

As an avid rock climber all the work in this video is incredible, mad respect to you and Jan for that adventure and then immortalizing it with the scan!

[@pwnisher]

Man what an experience that was. I'm used to multipitching, but the idea of dropping something hundreds of feet was just utterly terrifying.

[@quinncarlson640]

@@pwnisher definitely a tradeoff when climbing where you have to sacrifice a little bit of your comfort zone for a great experience!

[@telebeam6144]

I don't do 3d work. I have no interest in doing 3d work. And yet I consistently become engrossed by these lengthy-ass tutorials just on the power Clint's specificity and obvious passion. True champ.

[@pwnisher]

Heck yeah!! Thanks so much for checking this out 🙏🏼

[@LaSerpentDEden]

Having followed Clint from the beginnings of corridor back to this channel is such a mind-blowing experience. I just can't stop watching and being inspired by Clint in the same way he gets inspired by others. It feels indescribable

[@dani6816]

Currently the best 3D guy on youtube! , you are doing the right things for us , also maintaining an awesome community in discord , man THANK YOU!

[@pwnisher]

Hahahha i try, and can't do it alone! Thanks for your kind words!

[@ranchy9264]

Thank you so much for doing this! I'm just getting started with 3d scanning and having access to this incredibly thorough documentation is amazing😁

[@sotomonte_]

Four minutes in, and as I expected, this video is very SPECIAL!!! I can't wait to re-watch it with better internet whenever I get home from vacations at the highest quality. It's clear how hard you worked on this video, and the result speaks for itself. Much love!

[@danwallace2900]

From start to finish this was a fantastic tutorial, thanks Clint! Also being a rock climber this gets me excited to photoscan some of my favorite outdoor climbs.

[@MaxNovakTutorials]

Love your channel man! Been getting more into UE lately and its been a ton of fun.

[@christianvolkner2028]

You get better results if you export two sets of images from lightroom. One contrasty for Model Generation, one delit for Texture Generation. It is possible to tell RC to use these sets :-)

[@astralstormgamestudios1259]

Really? How do I set up RC to use the other textures set for texture generation?

[@JimiJames]

Clint, you are the man. The first portion of this video really made me feel inspired. I love the integration of your hobbies.

[@AlphaCharlieDroneServices]

That was a superb workflow and thorough explanation! I just started learning UE5 and this was so easy for me to follow. Thanks for uploading!

[@Nidy1135]

Impressive work, both the climbing and the art. I like your tutorial style, specially that you cover the details. Keep it up😁!

[@michaelhere985]

Top notch quality content as always pwnisher. Such a great video!

[@mjj1643]

This is the easiest and best tutorial for RC that I have found to date! Even I managed to get a good model!!

[@noahlmatos]

Cant wait for you to hit 1 Million!!!!

[@pwnisher]

Shoot it's gonna be SOON too!

[@meesrenders]

This video couldnt have come at a better time i literally started learning about 3d scanning today 10/10 super usefull great content once again

[@KillerTacos54]

Fantastic video Clint! Would love to see more stuff like this. It’s cool how this video was technically teased by Jan in the NERF finger video on Corridor. Also we’re only 7K subs away from 1M!!! Omg omg so excited for you Clint

[@Katzenha]

Insane! I love the energy to make something really special and cool. Big probs to you and your team

[@cepwin]

Great job!! I don't think I'd have the nerve to hang from a mountain to get a scan so mad props there as well! Your end results were super!

[@LuxoJunior]

Ahhh Clint! Epic & chill, this was the best thank you ❤️

[@MatthewHinmanTexas]

This is so cool. Great use of aerial tech to get a megascan!

[@pwnisher]

Thanks Matthew!!

[@oxygencube]

Dude! That was awesome. Some great tips here. Thank you

[@samuelmelton5021]

That was cool to see how modeling and scanning technology is becoming easier to use

[@randallcromer66]

Truly amazing work...my hats off in respect for your dedication and ingenuity. I never thought it could be possible to accomplish something like this. 👊😲👍

[@TripTilt]

awesome action and results!

[@mbeckerone]

This is so cool! I've kinda wanted to do this with climbing for awhile too haha, I think someone is making an app using this too, like a 3d mountain project. I think it was called "rock garden" or something. So rad!

[@jasonswanston]

You guys are awesome for this . Keep posting

[@ongbiker]

Very good so clear in every step how to make 3D scan , We need more great video like this

[@moiibrahem]

After Watching This GREAT WORK I'm Curious about 3D SO MUCH !! Thanks Clint

[@AeroPhil]

I'm currently writing on a thesis about photogrammetry in the construction industry and how to make target-actual comparisons. And AI is becoming a thing. Photogrammetry / LiDAR with drones is a huge new branch and the possibilities seem endless! I'm slightly hyped😎

[@thekingofnot8453]

this is sick

[@amirullokhmurod4107]

Thanks bro i got a new thing from yhis video. I hope you make again such kind of contents.👍

[@TheDaggwood]

You've inspired me to return to The Steens, haven't been in 20 years and I'm going to head back with full tech in hand. See you guys round the bend.

[@Md_Jubair]

That is awesome man, thank's for that, i appreciate this!

[@Macr2229]

Thank you. This video was so helpful for my business.

[@ErrorUnknownStudios]

Now this is next level... So good!

[@legacylee]

I needs to take out my drone, I'm hoping I can use it today to got a few aerials of the show I'm filming at (Inspecta Deck and Mastah Killa, Wu in the hooouse). Imma have to try this out. I blame you for my addiction to CG work hah. Peace out dude have a great weekend!

[@pwnisher]

Go get it and be safe! Thanks for watching!

[@legacylee]

@@pwnisher no, thank you!!! For posting Masta Clint! Stay safe keep creatin' and collaborating, and always inspire imagination! Peace

[@noj3da557]

If you kept it going till now you have all the respect that I can give

[@jackarnoldramirezvera6136]

Damn! Worked like a charm! Thank you soooo much!

[@TheBadBone23]

Outstanding video!

[@marktired4742]

Thanks for lesson number one I'm going to leave ssages on a few of your posts and maybe even a few links to soft I make in the

[@skippydinglechalk8546]

I WAS LITERALLY BORED AT WORK AND STARTED THINKING ABOUT PUTTING A LIDAR SCANNER ON A DRONE AND WONDERING IF THAT WAS A THING THEN I GOT HOME AND WAS RECCOMENDED THIS VIDEO. MY MIND IS BLOWN.

[@DanielRieger]

Currently working on a AAA game right now and this is pretty close to how we’re doing rocks and cliffs. But also a lot of cleanup to remove vegetation and some zbrush work to make the asset usable in multiple angles

[@bsbs6646]

for gta6

[@samuelzachert3837]

I've been using my DSLR and running the photos through darkroom and meshlab, then editing in blender. Haven't done any scans with my drone yet, although I am planning to at some point. I'm definitely trying out this workflow when I do though!

[@SpencerMagnusson]

Love the result! I can tell it didn't affect the final result much, which makes me wonder - how important is removing the harsh lighting in the original scan?

[@pwnisher]

In my case, it wasn’t severe because the sunlight only hit like 10-15% of the scan (cause we got there so dang early) but I also chose lighting condition (in 3d) that favored the scan, as well as framed out the pre-baked lighting as best i could.

[@legacyworx1856]

[@colombodiego74]

Great !! Thank you for your job

[@boigercat]

Just happy I get to see Jan twice in one month also great video 😊

[@instinctisfiercenotcruel.958]

This is such a great video

[@mr.antzstudios]

wow!! the final scene looks so sick:)

[@pwnisher]

Mr. ANTZ! Yooo wassup! Thanks dude! Yeah all Unreal Engine :D I'm falling deeper in love with the program.

[@mr.antzstudios]

@@pwnisher yeah man unreal is great ! You definitely inspired me to learn unreal:)

[@AjitheshGuruprasad]

You're doing god's work man! Amazing!

[@cd_core]

no way jose... im blown away dude - GGs

[@Treaplscans]

Looks pretty detailed! Very good scanning results. One issue I have with scanning big or medium rock-mountain geological formations are the overhanging parts - the bottom part of the overhanging rock is very dark because of the daylight shadow(not the sun shadow) and even with the new tool in Agisoft for delighting and extra Photoshop work- the texture is not really usable for high quality professional work.

[@ChillieGaming]

well u would need to shoot at overcast days and also try to get a drone that can fit godox ar400 ringflash with a dslr so that there are no shadows there.

[@beMOTIONdESIGN]

You've got some amazing dedication!! I'll stick with Megascans! Hahahaha! Great video!

[@novusparadium9430]

Imagine what a few 100 of these by some corporation could map out. Kinda mind blowing.

[@dyryiadi6492]

Thank you, it helped but i had a little bit of problems. Good Tutorial

[@teach607]

i've never seen a better example of youtube compression then at 20:10

[@pwnisher]

Textbook, son!

[@adamryason5509]

Amazing tutorial, life changing for me (literally). I'm putting together my first drone setup and I was wondering 1) what drone model are you using and 2) what was the total flight time (for batteries)?

[@jimj2683]

I think the ultimate would be to have a swarm of drones doing 3d scans. Like bees, but solar powered and linked to Starlink. Then you let them out into the wild and they scan the whole Earth bit by bit. Then AI is used to fuse and improve all those 3d scans together.

[@zeroflame0]

You are really the GOAT bro

[@jbiziou]

Very nice Clint ! :)

[@wankertosseroath]

'Why I did it from the side of the mountain' - but how else would you get a feel for the scale of it! Great scans :-) What drone was it? DJI Mini?

[@brunobordini7696]

You are the best man!

[@i_am_ergo]

The fact that I found Clint's channel RANDOMLY just yesterday after being a Corridor sub for years is a crime. You gotta plug it on the Corridor channel, brother. At least once.

[@Sebbir]

A pwnisher video at its finest

[@r.k.hegeler9794]

Awesomeness!

[@noorboiten552]

Love the crocs 🫶

[@ecastallion6079]

great stuff

[@RC-1290]

25:21 Note: normals should be unit length (i.e.: length of 1, normalized). Blending with a lerp will change their length, which can give unexpected lighting results. You could normalize the final values (so they're length 1 again), or you can use fancier math to rotate the normals rather than blending them. But really the main question is: are you sure you want to go through all the trouble of getting realistic normals only to flatten them again? Maybe you do, but you should probably at least think about it. Knowing the rules before breaking them and all that.

[@pwnisher]

If there's a better way to set up the normal channel i'm all ears! Thanks for the headsup.

[@RC-1290]

@@pwnisher I wanted to link to a relevant article, but KZbin doesn't like that. Here's attempt 2 without the link. Best: leave them untouched, unlike bump maps they're already accurate. Medium: look at normal map blending techniques like the one described in "Blending in detail" by Colin Barré-Brisebois and Stephen Hill (a.k.a.: self_shadow) Better than nothing: chuck a normalize node at the end. Some normals may still be a weird angles, or 0, but at least the non-zero ones are at least the right length.

[@2Jackrabbit]

@@pwnisher Yep lerping a blue color isn't how to do normal strength, the blue channel on a normal contains no information it's essentially a 50% gray on the blue channel. Lerping in general should be viewed as a gradient switch to blend A and B, if the alpha switch is overshooting value between 0 and 1 you are essentially boosting the A alone in an unpredicting way. You should multiply by the same number your R and G channel then combine it back with it's blue channel, normalize the result and plug that in. Red and Green channel is what containing the normal lighting info in X and Y , which is why there are different formatting (directX OpenGL) based on the software axis system (y-up, z-up). To sum up on your example: (R channel * float "normalStrenght") (G channel * float "normalStrenght") then feed the result back in a "AppendMany" (where the blue come from the original one or just a number 0.5) to construct the resulting normal, normalize node before plugging in. You could also plug in a lerp between the boosted normal and the original giving you even more fine tuning controls as long as you clamp the control value between 0 and 1. Furthermore, desaturation node works better than choosing a channel from the albedo texture, since the real way of desaturation is to average the channels ((R +G +B)*.33). But this is almost accurate. Otherwise never ever use a 16k textures in a game engine, when unpacked in memory your 2 textures would be using around 2GB of GPU RAM. it would be really really bad in a gaming context you would have tremendous chugging in streaming and the amount of crash reports on your game would be unmanageable ;). People sometimes mess up their understanding of weight of textures in a realtime context, it's not the compressed size that matters if the file is 138mb it's not relevant at all apart from telling you the size it will require on disk, when opened in memory it's uncompressed and for textures it's ((pixelwidth * pixelheight * number of channel) *1.3 mipmapping) bytes.

[@RC-1290]

@@2Jackrabbit Good addition about the uncompressed size! As for the R,G channels; I would expect it to be better to decode the normal, rather than trying to manipulate it in its compressed form.

[@2Jackrabbit]

@@RC-1290 No it would be totally fine since shaders works at runtime into what is uncompressed already ;) But that would still be the way to make a normal intensity, not a lerp with overshooting value in the alpha. That is something I teach about shader math, if you are "boosting" a lerp you either have the input wrong or using the wrong operation. A quicker way otherwise in unreal is to use the flatten normal node with a negative value.

[@bassplayingchris]

Very cool vid, can you use this with nanite in ue5 to include all them polygons?

[@hamuArt]

Good video! Nice to teach others! Side note Too many UV shells not optimal for real-time engines (break poly strips, limit optimal auto LOD, break GPU data stream). For good PBR material you need to take out shadows from the albedo - with AI.

[@original9vp]

This ones needed 👍

[@brokelobster2546]

Almost 1 million

[@nictanghe98]

seems like doing an extremply flattend model uving it and generating a heightmap wil make sculpting werry nice.

[@WilliamDuckett]

Hey Clint, was wondering what kind of drone you're using here, I'm looking into buying my first drone for photo-scanning buildings pre demolition to preserve the pieces of history that I can. Cliff looks sick, 10/10 would digitally climb that.

[@SubTheHan]

love ur videos!

[@BartKuipersdotcom]

You can actually do a proper delighting pass in a completely different (be it somewhat complex) way that will give you 100% control of the new lighting of the scene. What you can do is take an HDRI from somewhere that would be mid air here I guess, in front of the mountain cliff. Then use that HDRI to light the model with a clay material (just plain gray without spec etc). Then you can bake that to a map (which would be your lighting map). Then go to your diffuse map, divide that by your lighting map to get your diffuse texture without lighting. It works really well, especially on things like these if you can get a proper HDRI (need some distance in this case probably, but most lighting is done by the sun and the sky, not much is coming back from the ground). Only thing you might need to add manually is a sun light if the HDRI doesn't capture it properly or you need sharper shadows, but you can get rid of 90-95% of the lighting in your diffuse texture EDIT: If I have time, I'll try to do this with this cliff and post the results in a week or so

[@pwnisher]

Whoa!! I’m legit curious now! I’d love to see this in action. If you’re on Discord, hit me up (link in description)

[@BartKuipersdotcom]

@@pwnisher Sure, just did, sent you a dm on discord

[@IEproductions1]

@@BartKuipersdotcom Did you guys ever do this???!

[@horduks3770]

OH MANNNN! You deserve a sub after this video

[@lera2239]

hence on here a month later. thanks for making feel normal again.

[@syntheticfauna]

Thank you for sharing all this knowledge with us, that's good karma my friend...cheers from Costa Rica!

[@irishquinay2752]

TNice tutorials video is the best tutorial I’ve ever seen about soft soft

[@user-tn8qp7ys5m]

It was the sa for , In the GMS I switched the "Program" to "Analog app 1 TE"

[@LNL-S]

995K subs. Wow That's alot of it

[@scottweaverphotovideo]

Amazing project! I was unclear as to whether the path the drone took was programmed or it was all manual? And if you had to keep clicking off each shot yourself or it was automatic? Thanks!

[@axhobaxhobstar1369]

with it in a few weeks or months if I pour enough ti and effort into it. I'll be watcNice tutorialng many more of your videos for tips and inspiration.

[@Gunny672]

That is cool.

[@nightcow8767]

wtf man this is mental awesome

[@joaobatistaconceicaosilva2450]

Goooood job

[@egretfx]

Some national geographic content right there man!

[@mayankniraula6728]

Woooh man!!

[@SanOcelotl]

Are you working with the Quixel team or what, this is insane dude

[@EyeMCreative]

Is this the best way to get control over the textures? I am used to Blenders shader system, which gives you hue and saturation nodes, curves adjustment, as well as a slider for normal intensity. These are such common things to need to adjust that this seems strange to have to do these workarounds to be able to adjust these settings.

[@Alittleguy_]

Thanks

[@pablomeza4610]

Hello friend, everything goes perfectly but the models are seen in black and white, when should I colorize or how can I have the coloring of the model done automatically?

[@hutpfff1366]

Reality capture is free now for those who aren't companies with ( I believe) over a million/billion (?) dollar income.

[@mrvpnsecure9937]

I need one more challenge! How about to make a looped animation, max 1 min long with ability to put it as well on horizontal, or vertical screen. Really hard to find a nice live wallpapers on android/windows

[@sadness212]

Hi client I want to ask you how can you mix digital shadows and real one's?? 💚If you can make video about it that's will be great💚

[@user-xc7uo6md3n]

Ads that are relevant to videos are the best

[@pwnisher]

Agreed! I try to tailor them that way as often as possible.

[@ab-hx8qe]

Clint is my favorite pokemon

[@alecmiller5296]

Damn so close! I have the climbing gear and the drone but not the Jan

[@pwnisher]

Definitely give the scans a shot. It’s a blast. But yeah … having access to a Janimal is ideal.