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Secret 3D scans in the French Supreme Court

cosmowenman.substack.com

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Re: Secret 3D scans in the French Supreme Court

#21

Post by diggan »

mmooss wrote: post #9

Anyone in the world with an internet connection can view, interact with, and download the British Museum’s 3D scan of the Rosetta Stone, for example. The public can freely access hundreds of scans of classical sculpture from the National Gallery of Denmark, and visitors to the Smithsonian’s website can view, navigate, and freely download thousands of high-quality scans of artifacts ranging from dinosaur fossils to th…

> 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.

Re: Secret 3D scans in the French Supreme Court

#22

Post by marcinzm »

falcor84 wrote: post #17
BlueTemplar wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's nothing to "retain" once copyright is over (aside from moral rights, which are forever... which I guess becomes questionable after the death of the author ? But moral rights are not transferrable anyway). Instead for calling to basically blow up the whole legal framework around derivative works, maybe we should focus on bringing copyright terms back to more sane durations (like the original 14 years, renewabl…

I like the idea of having copyrights renewable indefinitely, but with the holders having to pay exponentially larger sums.

That seems to benefit large corporations at the expense of smaller artists. Either you focus on making money or some large corporation will swoop in the second you can't and exploit your work for their own profit.

Re: Secret 3D scans in the French Supreme Court

#23

Post by [deleted] »

tupshin wrote: post #15
Jyaif wrote: post #7

> in private, RMN admits it won’t release its scans because it wants to protect its gift shops’ sales revenue from competition from the public making their own replicas. Sounds like a pretty good reason

The article is long, but from TFA The court ruled that the museum’s revenue, business model, and supposed threats from competition and counterfeiting are irrelevant to the public’s right to access its scans, a dramatic rejection of the museum’s position...

[deleted]

Re: Secret 3D scans in the French Supreme Court

#24

Post by Symbiote »

> The court ruled that the museum’s revenue, business model, and supposed threats from competition and counterfeiting are irrelevant to the public’s right to access its scans, a dramatic rejection of the museum’s position

It would have helped the museum and government ministry if this had been clear before the government-funded scanning program was started. (Maybe it was, I don't know.)

I was initially sympathetic to the museum, as it's common for public funding to be tight, and revenue from the gift shop or commercial licencing of their objects can fill the gap. I don't know about France, but I expect the ministry has been heavily pushing public museums to increase their income in this way.

However, that doesn't justify the deception described by the article.

Re: Secret 3D scans in the French Supreme Court

#25

Post by permo-w »

diggan wrote: post #21
mmooss wrote: post #9

Anyone in the world with an internet connection can view, interact with, and download the British Museum’s 3D scan of the Rosetta Stone, for example. The public can freely access hundreds of scans of classical sculpture from the National Gallery of Denmark, and visitors to the Smithsonian’s website can view, navigate, and freely download thousands of high-quality scans of artifacts ranging from dinosaur fossils to th…

> 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 other…

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?

Re: Secret 3D scans in the French Supreme Court

#26

Post by pastage »

geokon wrote: post #8
praptak wrote: post #6

I am okay with public information being free to use commercially, with a huge disclaimer though. Wherever copyright is applicable, the public should retain it, that's what public domain is for. Any derived works, commercial or otherwise should also be in the public domain. If you fight for "public access" so that you can make your own stuff locked behind a copyright, then you are the hypocrite here.

an interesting example where this has been problematic is OpenStreetMap. They can't ingest a lot of government data b/c their project requires a relicense with their attribution-requirement (where all users are forced to have an ugly OSM bumper sticker on their maps)

FWIW attribution does not have to be big nor on the map, it is just less work to use the default than putting it elsewhere.

Re: Secret 3D scans in the French Supreme Court

#27

Post by diggan »

permo-w wrote: post #25
diggan wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 other…

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.

Re: Secret 3D scans in the French Supreme Court

#28

Post by AlunAlun »

permo-w wrote: post #25
diggan wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 other…

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?

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.

Re: Secret 3D scans in the French Supreme Court

#29

Post by BlueTemplar »

Symbiote wrote: post #24

> The court ruled that the museum’s revenue, business model, and supposed threats from competition and counterfeiting are irrelevant to the public’s right to access its scans, a dramatic rejection of the museum’s position It would have helped the museum and government ministry if this had been clear before the government-funded scanning program was started. (Maybe it was, I don't know.) I was initially sympathetic to…

In the previous story over the Nefertiti bust, the German museum tried to use this gift shop defense, but then when pressed, you could see that they made almost no money from it.

Re: Secret 3D scans in the French Supreme Court

#30

Post by poizan42 »

Jyaif wrote: post #7

> in private, RMN admits it won’t release its scans because it wants to protect its gift shops’ sales revenue from competition from the public making their own replicas. Sounds like a pretty good reason

As if it would be more difficult to just buy the thing from the gift shop and make copies of that. With a physical object you can make molds directly from that without having to figure out how to turn a point-cloud file into a physical object.

It's a pretty bad argument even besides the lack of legal relevance.

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