Photogrammetry from video

[infected247]

I was well aware of the concept of using still images of an object, in order to create a 3d model of it in CGI, but I stumbled upon a video on youtube and I think this takes it to a whole new level.
Definitely needs a lot of cleaning up, but even -state of the art- laser scanning requires a tremendous amount of post processing, plus you get all the textures baked in automatically. Have a look:

Copying from the video description:

I tried to use photogrammetry to create track mod for Assetto Corsa. Result is not perfect, but it is usable. Needs more ironing out.

00:00​ - Comaprison with real footage
01:26​ - One lap racing

The software used is Reality Capture. I recorded video with a gopro mounted on a bike. 4 directions are recorded, forward, backward, left and right. Every 10th frame, or so, is extracted from the videos, not every frame is used. There were about 4.000 images, but with later experiments I realised it could be done with much less. This reconstruction took about 5 days with the manual addition of many control points, and not counting numerous previous failed attempts. It was reconstructed in parts and then they were combined together into one whole track.

So, what do you think? Definitely needs a lot more work to call it perfect, but I think it's very impressive nonetheless. I'm very curious to see if this will catch on and most importantly what it will look like in 5-10 years from now.

Edit: I am in no way affiliate with, or trying to promote any of the software/developers mentioned.

[Hawk]

In it's current state, I'd lean on the fact that it would need so much work to clean-up the scene that one might as well create the scene properly from scratch in the first place.....

If you have ever worked on scenes that need a lot of clean-up work then you know what a pain in the arse it is to work with, and there comes a point were you just think it would be quicker and much better to just start from nothing and create the scene oneself.

There are much better apps out there for creating these kind of scenes - "City Engine" for example I would say would be a much better starting point app to work with than having the kind of mess to deal with in the example your showing there in the videos.

[infected247]

In it's current state, I'd lean on the fact that it would need so much work to clean-up the scene that one might as well create the scene properly from scratch in the first place.....

I agree with the clean-up part, but I think that the typical "build from scratch" approach won't have a place in the future, as newer technologies emerge. (at least with major sim racing projects)

How different would it be, with respect to man-hours of work and overall frustration , to create a race track from a cloud of laser scanned points, than cleaning up something like that? Ok, the vegetation definitely has to go, but that can easily be replaced with stock models, it's irrelevant to the fidelity of the track.

Anyway, this method is obviously premature at this point of time, but it does look like a promising alternative in the future, doesn't it? I didn't know of any software that could pull this off, I'll go check out the one you mentioned too.