inciprocal Inc. designs and develops end-to-end asset pipeline for high performance AR/VR applications, eCommerce, VFX and video game industries.
San Francisco, CA
Joined December 2018
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12-light setup targeted to augment existing photogrammetry rigs with addition of advanced Disney PBR material reconstruction. This particular setup is great for prop and flat 2D material scanning. Compact, portable and could be powered by off the shelf 12V Power banks.
Stress testing some really tough cases of firewood scanning, processing and rendering. It's all its fiber-y structure that makes it tricky with all the local, pixel and sub-pixel level global illumination effects.
Here is another great example of utilizing @inciprocal rig and PBR processing for Hi-end photo realistic asset production from the Keal Studio. An in-depth look at their AAA Weapon Art Pipeline:
kealstudio.com/blog/
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Doing some weight stress testing of the DIY XY Stage (xy table). Moving around a 1 gallon of water, that's 3.8 kg, looks just fine. More than enough for any scanning automation (props and flat swatches). The drivers are cold. Don't even need any heatsinks 馃檧
With the wide availability of CNC parts in many shapes and sizes, it has never been easier to build an automated XY stage for high-resolution PBR material scanning using only a minimal number of components: a couple of linear guides, an MCU, and a pair of drivers.
12 light rig with 4 light extensions to capture extra sub surface scattering at glancing angles. Configured for 2D high resolution PBR capture.
In cases when scan-time metadata or alignment is not available and you need to properly orient objects with as few clicks as possible here is a simple #Blender script that does just that. Align the camera so the object roughly faces the camera and then perform a gravity drop.
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Have been playing around with some automated scan alignment under the absence of any related metadata (cameras, registration, etc...). All classical geometric solutions work except they do need some validation from a visual model. Gemini is the best so far, then GPT, then Grok.
Wrapping up testing and shipping the last order of 2025. This is a lower-end 4-light variant of our standard 12-light rig. This one can't do a single view scan but is more portable and well suited for props though requires significantly more camera positions for quality results.
2K Games the Minotaur Rig prototype complete and calibrated. This is our most minimalistic and optimized PBR face scanning rig configuration so far. Running 20 Sony A9 III cameras at 60 fps and 16 composite light clusters using IDA Tronic lights.
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Got some CAD parts of a custom Tilta CPL micro-motor worked out and 3D printed to test the fitting. It's almost injection molding friendly but some modification will be needed for sure. Especially the addition of draft angles.
That's quite a step from our older stepper-based prototypes that has way to many issues with vibrations and noise. This also has faster speed than an original Tilta servo. After shrinking all electronics down to a couple of chips this may be in product soon.
Calibrating White Balance for multi-cam / multi-light Light Stage-like rigs can be quite tedious. Apart from cameras, there is alight light color variation as well as natural Poisson noise in RAW images that can greatly tint the result requiring a number of samples to converge.
Driving Tilta CPL with a custom closed-loop DC micro-motor.
Naked eyes can really play a trick on you. Cranking things is to false colors is important to see real color uniformity of lights. As a part of rig assembly and packaging. Most of the things can be corrected in software but it's easier to work with more similar footage than not.
A wide angle view... While the standard 12-light rig is very versatile, the 24-light 180 degree Arc is ideal when scanning through a props of similar sizes and topologies. Once tuned, it's a beast.
skfb.ly/oFRxT
PBR Capture of Adidas IF6704 with 180 degree 24-Light Arc. 5 Cameras, 24 lights, 2 polarization states (48 shots per position). Sony Alpha 1 electronic 1/30 shutter at 15 fps burst synchronized. The shutter sound is digital, just for exposure indication. skfb.ly/p7Hsu
Simplifying rig calibration in upcoming 1.4.2 #inciprocal Photometry Toolkit release with automatic highlight matching. Once the mirror ball aligned, the entire sequence is automatically mapped into the rig's 3D space with proper light positioning.