The Poly Haven team traveled to the arid desert near the West coast of South Africa to 3D scan the arid desert. They now released these assets under a CC0 license called "Namaqualand".
The project required a 12-hour drive from Joburg and was carried out in Goegap Nature Reserve, with the team camping in lodgings that had a small solar system for power.
The team used various equipment for scanning, including a black velvet backdrop, turntable, cross-polarized ring flash, Elinchrom ELB 500 rig, and a motorized single-axis gantry.
Scanning plants with photogrammetry was challenging, so the team also captured photometric stereo scans from plant debris.
Most plant assets were created dynamically with Blender’s geometry nodes, using a combination of various scan data, references, and many months of hard work.
Make sure you read the blog post about this project!
1 Comment
Thanks for posting this Bart. The models are really nice and I applaud PolyHaven for sharing such high-quality assets which give a CC0 alternative to Megascans, but I do note the Blender and GLTF downloads of these assets don't include the alpha channel, but you can get that by downloading the ZIP file instead and manually adding the alpha image to the shader yourself. Not hard, but it'll save you 15 minutes of head scratching if you don't know that going in. You're welcome! :)