[img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/43535104/5cbaf90bbb983db96bcb4a9abaa752a05002e44f.jpg[/img] We rely heavily on photogrammetry for the production of our realistic climbing game New Heights. In this series of articles we will attempt to explain why, how and how we got to this point. For our climbing system to work it needs something to hold on to, because climbing in the air or on a flat wall would be quite difficult. So we need some (collider) meshes, but how detailed do we need them? About 100M - 500M verts, those kinds of models. They are rocks (think more like whole cliffs), which have to be super detailed, because you have to actually climb on the details. More detailed = more better for us. Luckily, we have a constraint: these meganormous rocks will NOT move. Since we are mostly developers, and a little crazy, we thought it would be a good idea to look into other ways of creating these 3D models than to just model them, because it seemed like it would be a lot of work to model realistic looking mountains that would also be fun to climb on. When you model a cliff for the purpose of it being climbable it’s also easy to focus too much on “creating routes”. This would not be optimal for the realistic experience that we are trying to create as it would simplify the puzzle of climbing too much. Scanning seemed to be the obvious answer as an alternative. 3D scanning is already used extensively in games and even movies so how hard can it be? After doing some research into methods of 3D scanning it came down to photogrammetry (based on photos) or LiDAR (based on infrared lasers). A quick search later, we found that LiDAR could be adversely affected by sunlight. This would obviously be a bad thing for us as we would be going outside to scan the cliffs and boulders. Also looking at the prices we would much rather work with photogrammetry, since hooking a good outdoor LiDAR to a phone or drone would be quite pricey. A major advantage of photogrammetry is that the model will already have a texture and not just a texture, but actually how it looks in real life. At least how it looked on the day that we did the scanning. Changes in weather conditions, like a cloud moving in front of the sun, will show up in the textures of the final models. So it is decided photogrammetry is going to be our way forward for creating these meganormous rocks. In the next part we will go over running some photogrammetry tests and fundamental decisions we made for how we will be doing the photo scanning.