I was contracted to shoot drone videos for a reference video for GeoGeo, a company installing large scale Geothermal heating solutions. After consulting with the firm it came clear it would be great to include some 3D graphics to show how the geothermal pipes go deep underground.
Techniques and steps:
Drone videos and still photos (Mavic Air 2).
Blender was used to split the videos into frames.
Drone footage was selected to be motion-tracked and tracking was done inside Blender with brute force methods.
Meshroom was used to take the images and construct a pointcloud and a textured mesh of the area. This proved to be very low quality, more images should have been taken but the weather and time was not allowing for that
Blender was used to patch up some parts of the mesh and reconstruct the building mostly. Textures were partly baked into a remodelled building and partly reprojected from still images.
Animation logic was created straight onto the shaders to create an effect of blending between Drone-footage and 3D-graphics.
Lighting was created to mimic the original lighting of the scene in 3D-space.
Additional content were modelled in Blender and some text were added in Adobe Premiere.
The project was rendered in Eevee to reduce rendering time and cost.
Video can be seen at: 1:15->
Video - Case Sinihelmi
Learning points:
4K is very good when doing motion tracking!
Weather can make shooting very hard, straight sunshine usually creates problems for photogrammetry and as such it proved to be very hard to create a good mesh of a mostly reflective building. But waiting for a perfect day might be impossible!
Whenever shooting images and videos for photogrammetry, take 5 times the images you think you need. This project was saved because I managed to reproject still images taken from all sides of the building into the remodelled mesh, take those!