A little 3D can go a long way

Some people still doubt of the added benefits to 3D information. While the readers of this blog (should!) have gone past this stage and now understand the added benefit of going from 2D to 3D, sometimes a little piece with a strong visual impact helps convince anybody… 🙂

It is exactly what we have here: something that goes from ordinary to really great, with a bit of 3D information used well. Watch the video and continue reading the article to find out how this was done.

Game Day – At Nokia Arena, home of Maccabi Electra Tel Aviv from Ariel Leviatan on Vimeo.

In the 3d modeling world, this technique is called Camera Mapping, which consists of projecting a photograph onto a 3D scene in order to texture it.

In this case, the twist is that a time-lapse video is projected on the 3D scene instead of a single still image. The 3D scene here was modeled in Blender, an open-source 3d modeling software and the video was acquired using a Logitech webcam, which makes this result even more impressive. The author of this clip made a behind-the-scenes post which outlines the workflow to achieve this goal.

While we see some artifacts inherent to texture projection (some stretching and misprojections), this result shows really well that with a little imagination it is possible to achieve impressive results. Anyone got some examples where a simple addition of 3d information takes a rather bland result and turns it into something impressive?