Cosmic 3D scanning

Cosmic 3D scanning

That is very important to reconstruct an authentic copy of the cosmic outfit of Alexey Leonov for the spacewalk episode of the movie “The time of pioneers (trailbreakers, pathfinders)” – a spacesuit with all its minute particulars. In order to achieve the max precision while practically making the spacesuit the film creators have to dispose a very detailed information. We decided to scan the stuff we needed and visited the museum of the scientific-production enterprise “Zvezda” where the original spacesuit of Alexey A. Leonov was worked out and is still stored.

   

 

For the scanning we use a mobile 3D scanner of our own construction which operates the technology of a structured light and is made of an ordinary video-projector, two special high-res compact video cameras and a photocamera with a variable focal distance for textures acquisition.

 

 

Here's the technology: we project the light grid onto the object we need to scan and the cameras fix deformations of the grid and calculate the distance up to each pixel in the field of view. With our scanner we can scan objects from 1cm up to 1.5 meters in size.

   

Three dimension scanning is quite a painstaking process as during one scan which takes at about five seconds we get a fragment of only one part of the object. In order to get the whole model we have to rotate the object and make more scans. The quantity of rotations depends on the complexity of the model – for example we had to have the bag (oxygen cylinder) turned over 15 times.

The development of the scanner was started a year ago. Some tasks our studio faced required having highly detailed reference images and models.
The quality of scanning through photogrammetry did not satisfy us and equipment from third parties as the off the shelf solutions were too expensive and did not correspond to all our requirements.

 

We studied scanners of different types on the market and the structured light scanners were seemed to be the best solution.

After studying some theory and construction of those scanners we made the decision to build one in our studio. 

Initially the construction was very precarious, the scanning took us too long and the results were inaccurate but later on we selected the optimal configuration, created the necessary set of calibration targets and worked hard to improve the software.

Now we plan to create a beautiful branded case for it which will make our invention look finalized.


3D models we get are being used as a basis for a future working processes – in this case that is an intermediate result for wardrobe department of the movie. They will  build exact physical copy  of Alexey Leonov’s outfit that will be used as prop on the film stage.
It will be scanned once again and the CG doubles, identical to their prototypes and to the shooting props will be created for usage in the VFX shots.