3D Photography Workflow | Using Metashape + Blender

In this video I am explaining the workflow I used to create these photorealistic renders of my RED using Metashape and Blender. Imagine having flexible assets -- products that you can relight within seconds with lenses you don't own and gear you don't have. I created these images with no studio space, no stands, no lights -- just a camera and a computer.

This was meant to present my workflow in general, I created a more step-by-step process video that you can check out on my channel for a more specific tutorial on doing this with Metashape and Blender. For whatever reason I decided to mention that I don't know why you should do some things here, my point in saying that is that you can do this stuff with limited knowledge. I hope that doesn't discourage some people from trying this out, if you just follow along you'll be able to make some really cool stuff in a surprisingly simple way.

Process:

Taking photos; Shoot in a softly lit environment with limited shadows on your object. (Feel free to try shooting with your phone!)
Try to keep your aperture as small as you can (4.0 - 8.0), and your shutter speed as high as you can. You want to limit shutter drag and depth of field fall off.

Open Metashape, you can add .cr2’s (or jpgs, or preprocessed png’s like I did through Lightroom) directly into chunks. (Metashape has the ability to process videos if you try to film an object, I haven't tested this, I also assume that the 35mp raw images from my 5D are going to be a lot better than the video I can shoot with it).

Rick click the chunk, go to process, Align Photos. (You can look into “optimizing photos” in Metashape)(Also, look into the bounding box).

Clean any “noise” in the sparse point cloud (any points that are not your object).

Process the Dense point cloud. Clean this up as much as you can.

Build the Mesh

Build the Texture

Export the Model with the Texture

Import the object into blender and add lights from there.

Use the Cycles render engine, and change the resolution of your render, mess with rendering samples (128 as a base, I haven’t done more than 512). Blender has so many tutorials, if you have questions, I’m sure someone has done a tutorial on it!

In the beginning, you can shoot your object upright, and flip it over to shoot the bottom. This is what I did with the RED Camera and Metashape figured it out. I tried it on a few other objects and it couldn’t align the bottom of object. To address this you can add all of the photos of the top portion of the object to one chunk and align that, and then add the photos of the bottom portion of the object to a different chunk and align the photos in that chunk. Then you can Align Chunks, and then Merge Chunks. (I don’t explain this here, go ahead and google that! I honestly did not have much success with this the one time I tried it, but I’m sure I’ll figure that out eventually, having the whole object is pretty important!)

I don't address this in the video, but, you don't just have to render photos, you can add camera paths with keyframes, zoom the lens in, orbit the object, rotate the object, and export videos of any of this. I might make tutorials on this, my main goal is to introduce this simple workflow for obtaining 3D photorealistic objects of products for clients or anything like that.

GEAR:
Canon 5D Mark IV https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1274705-REG/canon_eos_5d_mark_iv.html
Canon 50MM Lens
MacBook Pro (15-inch, 2019)
2.4 GHz Intel Core i9
32 GB 2400 MHz DDR4
Radeon Pro Vega 20 4 GB
Intel UHD Graphics 630 1536 MB

SOFTWARE:
https://www.agisoft.com
https://www.blender.org
https://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop-lightroom.html

Also check out RealityCapture or Meshroom instead of Metashape
Also look into Unreal Engine, or Cinema 4D instead of Blender

SOCIAL:
www.tristgram.com
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Видео 3D Photography Workflow | Using Metashape + Blender канала Tristan Gramling