Secret 3D scans in the French Supreme Court

> Has anyone used these in games?

No doubt someone has put some of them into games. However, most likely not in it's original shape/form, as the scans usually produce highly inefficiently (but high resolution, great for renders) meshes. The meshes from scans tend to be a mess, and when inserting a 3D model for games, you care a lot about how optimized the meshes are, and that the mesh has a low polygon count as otherwise you'll tank the performance quickly.

So since a developer couldn't just copy-paste the model into the game (requires a prepass to fix issues/optimize before import), it'll take valuable time from other things for just this easter egg. Again, no doubt someone has done this at one point or another, but that's probably why it isn't as common as someone could think.

As an example, take a look at the wireframe of the Rosetta Stone (https://i.imgur.com/rtpiwjZ.png | https://github.com/BritishMuseumDH/rosettaStone/blob/master/...) and you'll see what I mean. For a high quality rock-like object, you'd probably aim for 2000-5000 triangles, while the Rosetta Stone scan seems to have 480,000 triangles straight from the scanning software.

Sadly, it's simply too much detail to be able to import straight up. Luckily, Nanite ("Virtualized Geometry") and similar implementations starts to give us tools so we can stop caring about things like this and let the game engine optimize stuff on the fly.

so it wouldn't be easy because these scans are highly detailed and so would require too many polygons to be loaded at once

would this remain true for modern higher end graphics cards?

> but you have to compress the scan

A bit simplified but yeah. In the industry I think it's commonly referred to as "cleaning up the topology" or "simplifying the topology" where "topology" is the structure of the mesh essentially. You'd put the scan/model through something like this: https://sketchfab.com/blogs/community/retopologise-3d-scans-...

> is this true with top spec machines too?

Games frequently feature 100s (sometimes 1000s) of models at the same time, so the optimization of each model is important. Take a look at the launch of Cities Skylines 2 for an example of a game that launched without properly optimized 3D models, the performance was absolutely abysmal because the human/resident models were way more detailed than justified for a city simulation game.

For rendering an individual piece, maybe not; but as part of much larger scene with many objects, animation, and rendering effects, it would place an unnecessary burden on the GPU.

It would be much easier to simply have a 3D artist create the object anew from scratch, in a format and resolution that best fits the game.

Even modern high end graphics cards use abstractions of the base data to create vast amounts of the final output's fine detail. For example tessellation and other techniques used for complex geometry like compound curves, which allow millions or billions of polygons can be visually simulated without needing to be present as polygon data, increasing opportunity for processing parallelization, while reducing load on communication busses and VRAM.

As an example, you could probably represent something like the grip of this FLIR camera in a couple hundred polygons and surface/curve definitions to help the rendering engine tesselate correctly. On the other hand, this overall scan is 357000 vertexes. Sure you can simplify it and bake a bunch of the texture into a normal map, but that then requires manually reworking the texture map and various other postprocessing steps to avoid creating a glitchy mess.

https://i.imgur.com/aAwoiXU.png

> it wouldn't be easy because these scans are highly detailed and so would require too many polygons to be loaded at once

In practice a a 3d artist could very easily create low poly models for these objects. For that low poly replica the high poly model can serve as a useful reference. (But to be honest many artist can just look at images of the object and do the same.)

This is not even hard, on the order of minutes (for something like the Rosetta Stone) or days (for something seriously detailed).

In this case where there is a will, there is a way. In fact this "reduction" step very often part of the game creation pipeline already. Monsters/characters/objects very often get sculpted at a higher resolution and then those high resolution meshes are reduced down to something more manageable (while they bake the details into a bump map texture, or similar).

That makes a lot of sense, thanks.

Still, let's not forget that the detail, the last nuances, is what makes great art so powerful. Lots of people can paint sunflowers or a cathedral (or make a typical computer game).

Working that into a computer game is of course a big practical issue, as you say; also, unless the players will zoom way in for some reason, possibly the maximum effect is a resolution that's still less than what the museums provide. But maybe for the ultimate prize at the end, a close look in the treasure chest, when all the other on-screen action is done? It's hard to provide a visual reward that lives up to the moment, or exceeds it, after 100 hours of play.

Higher end graphics cards probably also mean more detailed scans being available.

Maybe I'm buying into the marketing too much, but it's my understanding that Unreal engine 5 can do this automatically.

Not too much, it does actually work :) The concept is generally called "virtualized geometry" and Unreal's implementation is called "Nanite" but others are starting to pop up too, like the virtualized geometry implementation in Bevy.

The published British Museum Rosetta stone is not even what I would consider a high quality scan today. In a proper scan you would be able to easily discern the carved writing just from the geometry. At 1mm faces, it's actually a pretty good candidate to dump straight into UE5 nanite so I disagree fundamentally that it is not able to be used in games. The only real question for the modern developer is whether it makes sense to spend ~50MB budget to put the thing in.

> it's actually a pretty good candidate to dump straight into UE5 nanite so I disagree fundamentally that it is not able to be used in games.

Yeah, obviously the new virtualized geometry approach modern engines are taking kind of make that argument less valid. I thought I was doing a good job ending my comment with mentioning this recent change, but maybe I didn't make it clear enough :)

I sincerely hope more games allow virtual interactions with culturally significant art. Hell, I'd love a virtual tour of major art institutions!

It's not Rodin, but the game Horizon: Forbidden West has a segment where you get to view + interact with renderings of some paintings by Vermeer and Rembrandt. I've seen some of these in person at a museum in San Francisco, but somehow the experience was more meaningful in the game, despite having comparative potato quality compared to real life. I think what made the difference was that in the game, each painting had several lines of dialogue about what the painting represented, or elements thereof represented, about what was going on when the artist created it, etc, and the dialogue choices included questions I would never have thought to ask about in person.

I know that museums have virtual tours that have ausio descriptions like that about the art pieces, but I've never managed to take advantage of them. Can you imagine being able to take a high-detail virtual tour (even if not in VR) of a museum like the one in the article, or the Louvre, where you could spend as long as you want looking at every painting, zoom in at details like brushwork or how the light hits it, and have an expanding set of accessible narration (or readable text) about each item?

3d scanning is a pretty common technique to get some example geometry for stuff in games. It's not difficult to retopologize the scans to work better in a game engine. I don't know much about those pipelines though, but either way 3d scanning is super popular in the industry. Check this for example https://sketchfab.com/blogs/community/retopologise-3d-scans-...

> I sincerely hope more games allow virtual interactions with culturally significant art. Hell, I'd love a virtual tour of major art institutions!

Outside of virtual tours, death match in a museum would be fun too. It might be cool to see where popular works of art end up in post-apocalyptic/future settings too.

Even less popular artworks could help add to the art that appears in video games. It can help cut down on the costs of using stock images or creating "generic" art in-house and hopefully create more impressive and immersive environments.

> death match in a museum would be fun too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fh40nFH4-A0