DO YOU WANT TO KNOW HOW TO MAKE ANATOMICALLY ACCURATE HUMAN TEETH FOR YOUR DIGITAL CHARACTER??
TUNE IN!
Okay, cool, the first thing is to know you are basing this whole approach on the real – life references.
So either do it yourself or find someone who you want your teeth to come from.
It is extremely important that you are basing it on the digital double.
Meaning the person you are creating in 3D – has to be based on the real person in life.
This will gurantee your 100% success in this field.
If you are trying anything else or a styalised apporach – forget it.
Do this first, and then styalise.
Or try to change the identity.
Simply because everything we do here is data – driven and supported by the most complex reality ever created – LIFE!
Cool.
So you want to sign up for a dentist appointment at your local clinnic and get yourself an “impressions” scans.
There are bunch of videos on YouTube – simply search for making impressions of teeth.
These are first are made from a silicone material and pressed againtst your upper and lower teeth.
I have done it myself and I can tell you that this process is toxic!!
But you just have to learn how to hold your breath for a few minutes.
You can still breath by the way …
Right, on, then your Doctor will give you “negatives” of your “impressions” and these are ready to be scanned.
Here how they will look like:
This was a sample from my project I did at the AUT University – White Storm. A digital film about the digital character with two personalities – artificial and human.
Cool!
Once you get those – make sure to use Cannon 5D or very similar to obtain a lot of photographic references of these two objects.
You do not have to paint the grid on it, simpy place it on the white sheet of paper and draw a few crosses or any VFX marker – type of symbol for the enhancemeent of the photogrammetric recostruciton.
And then use AgiSoft Metashape to reconstruct it in 3D.
It is a generally a very common practice at the moment and everyone is using it in production for video games, film and animation productions of the digital characters.
Be careful taking too many images because the system can be confused easily.
So it is actually awlays good to take just enough in order to cover the surface of the teeth object.
And make sure you use a good gaming – like GPU ( graphics card ) so you are good to go on this.
By the way this technique is nothing new and widelly documented on sites like FXphd and other similar publications.
If you wanted to see some very comprehensive approaches – look at a few Disney Research papers on the statistical analysis for teeth reconstruction using a single video source.
Simply search for Disney Reseach – Model-Based Teeth Reconstruction.
And I have uploaded the Sandy’s lower teeth on SketchFab for you to check out here.
These are simply .ply points but these are quite impressive to explore in three dimensions.
Cool!
So then our goal is to run a re-meshing process.
I love to get my meshes that are ready to go into the game with the uv’s from turbosquid.com or places like 3D scanning stores.
My faviourite one is – https://www.3dscanstore.com – check it out – you can get the entire ready to be placed into your project data.
And I would not make anything fancy and just use 3D modeling software or a sculpting software that some of them actually free and online based to make geometry meshes for the character.
In terms of texturing and covering this with the colour …
This is much trickier than you think.
Most of the time because you will face challenges with dark areas of the mouth.
A lot of it is hard to photograph.
My project is quite stylised in terms of it being published on SketchFab.
So I do not plan to make it highly realistic from the texture perspective.
But if you do have access – I would use Canon 5D to capture as much of the mouth reference as possible.
And take in account that the mouth is very wet, so you want to capture lots of angles.
And if you wanted to investigate oral reconstruction in 3D further for the medical field, have a look at the technologies that allow digital reconstruction and scanning used in dental clinics at the moment.
The hardware is very specific and very specialised – but it will not cost you more than $100 or $200 approximatelly to have a doctor’s appointment in order to obtain this type of dataset.
https://www.3shape.com
Check it out – it is just incredible!! – and they would simply use open formats widely used in CAD systems in order to export meshes for you to use in your 3D Modelling software.
I hope you have enjoyed the post and have found something interesting.
Hit me a reply if you have any questions or have anything helpful to look at in this filed or related content!
All the best!
Cheers!