"Yathikpa – the fire in the sea" by Wurrandan Marawili - Photogrammetry breakdown

All renders are in realtime. This entire sculpture is constructed from metal pieces, which is highly reflective and unforgiving for photogrammetry. Using a cross-popularised ring flash, over 2000 images were captured to reconstruct the model in 3D. The sculpture being 3m tall also compounded the difficulty accessing the higher areas. The original high poly mesh came out with surface imperfections that were not good enough to bake a normal map down. The high, however, was used as a base mesh to remodel the sculpture from scratch, and textures rebaked. A bump map derived from the cleaner albedo map was used instead of a normal map. It is another challenging piece to scan, but the model's striking size and impact help bring this 3d piece to life.