Tag: 3d

Formlabs

It’s been my privilege to do teardowns on both the Formlabs Form 1 and Form 2. With the recent release of the Form 3, I was asked by Formlabs if I wanted to do another teardown, and of course I jumped on the opportunity. I always learn an immense amount while taking apart their machines, and it’s also been very satisfying to watch their engineering team grow and mature over the years.

this is pretty interesting from a reverse engineering perspective, and i applaud formlabs for their nice printers… but: this is still creating gimmicky plastic prints, rather than much more interesting materials.

Salvator Mundi decoded

The world’s costliest painting depicts a glass sphere with curious optical properties. Computer scientists figured out what the artist was getting at.

After comparing their renderings with the original, they have concluded that the orb is not solid at all. Instead, they show that the painting is a realistic physical representation of a hollow sphere with a radius of 6.8 centimeters but a thickness of just 1.3 millimeters.

Paris Through History

In 2012, a company called Dassault Systèmes launched an interactive application that allowed you to move about in a 3D historical reconstruction of Paris at different points in its history. The application seems to have fallen into disrepair so that you can’t actually use it, but the 13-minute video above offers a tour through several time periods, including: 52 BCE. The area was home to a Celtic group called the Parisii, just before the Romans conquered the settlement. 2nd century CE. The Romans ruled here until 486 CE; they called the city Lutetia. 1165-1350. The medieval period. Paris was one of the largest cities in Europe. 1789. A look at the Bastille during the French Revolution. 1887-1889. The construction of the Eiffel Tower for the 1889 World’s Fair. It was the tallest man-made structure in the world for more than 40 years (eclipsed by the Chrysler Building).

DigiDoug

The debut of DigiDoug, a 3D digital twin rendered in real-time in incredible detail. The current 160 ms time lag will shrink with each turn of Moore’s Law. See a supercool demo of the deepfake future, today.

State of Realtime Rendering

Astonishingly Photorealistic Real-Time Rendered Scene

To prepare for the project, Quixel spent 1 month in cold and wet locations in Iceland, scanning all kinds of objects found in the natural environment using. The team returned with over 1000 scans that captured the details of the landscape. Using the scans — a part of Quixel’s Megascans library — a team of 3 artists at Quixel created the 1:45 cinematic film in real-time using the power of the Unreal Engine 4 game engine.

turning 2D into 3D

We present a method that enables users to perform the full range of 3D manipulations, including scaling, rotation, translation, and nonrigid deformations, to an object in a photograph. As 3D manipulations often reveal parts of the object that are hidden in the original photograph, our approach uses publicly available 3D models to guide the completion of the geometry and appearance of the revealed areas of the object. The completion process leverages the structure and symmetry in the stock 3D model to factor out the effects of illumination, and to complete the appearance of the object. We demonstrate our system by producing object manipulations that would be impossible in traditional 2D photo-editing programs, such as turning a car over, making a paper-crane flap its wings, or manipulating airplanes in a historical photograph to change its story.