A texturing experiment with cross-polarized light...

I have been playing around with photogrammetry for many years now and wanted to push it further. Photogrammetry is the process of shooting a subject from many different viewpoints and allowing the computer to detect features. With these features and information about the camera's lens, the computer is able to create a 3D pointcloud of the subject (see GIF). This can then be processed into a 3D model with the photographs of the subject mapped back on. This gives a reasonably accurate geometry and texture, however the texture is always flat.

In this method however I have shot the subject in two different types of light, radially polarized light and linearly polarized light (see GIF). By doing this I am able to get one flat image of the subject without any reflective areas and another image with the reflective parts of the subject. By taking these two images and subtracting them from one another it leaves me with a map of the specularity (shininess) of the shoe. When rendering this through 3D software I am able to get a much more realistic interaction with lights within the scene.

Music:
sunshine - Roy Ayers