3D laser scanning creates better graphics
Back in the day we used to pull out the Atari joystick and dive into a mean game of Pac-Man or Space Invaders. Oh how things have changed. Gaming has travelled a long long road. The road from pong to Real-time 3D has seen a lot of growth and progress in between, and for the foreseeable future, it is not going to stop. Hardware is producing faster machines and graphics cards are putting out more real-life images. But that doesn’t mean we have arrived yet. There is still a lit of room to grow. We still haven’t reached the point where games appear like real world images.
Producing better quality games is not just about coming out with faster machines with better graphics. It is also about labor and creativity. These newer games need people to work hard to produce the material for it. They also need better techniques to produce better content to keep up with the faster equipment. In the past, even up till today, the most common way to create content for high quality graphics games was always to simply hand create the objects. Every single object that appeared in the the game would have to be drawn out. That took a lot of hours. Fortunately, there seems to be a better way.
How 3D laser scanning improves gaming graphics
3D laser scanning, it seems, has a better solution than having to design every object from scratch. 3D laser scanning takes a real-life object and scans it into digital form. From there the digital copy can be used instead of manually creating each object. That saves a lot of time, and it also adds more realistic detail to the object in the game.
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When 3D laser scanning is used for creating content for the game, it resolves some rather challenging difficulties. One of those difficulties is creating faces and bodies for the game. This can take an excessive amount of time for the program to try to make things look realistic. And even after spending all that the time, it may still turn out awkward. 3D laser scanning can capture the features of the face perfectly and the job can be done rather effortlessly. Sony’s Playstation 2 was one of the first gaming machines to utilize 3D scanning for their game machine. The game American Major League Baseball, produced by Sony Computer Entertainment also took advantage of 3D laser scanning to produce their players. To make the game more realistic, they scanned about 1400 players, but considering that it only took about 90 seconds to scan each per person, the project went rather quickly.
The utilization of 3D laser scanning is making things easier for the game industry for sure. Any real life object can be translated into digital format. Someday there will probably be a more efficient method for producing game material. Who knows. Maybe there will be a method that will be able to put a real-life image of yourself in the game. I guess we will all have to just wait and see.
