On our production here we have a guy that's a great sculptor/model maker, but doesn't know much about computers. He models the characters in clay (cernit), and then we simply take side/top/front/back photos of the figures and use those on planes in Maya as reference for the other modelers. Works great.
When I used the Microscribe, we used a beta version of Rhino (this was before Rhino 1.0), which would get us curves we could then make surfaces from and import into SoftImage3D. We didn't use point cloud data, as we were going to use NURBS for the models. (Point clouds was an option too, but I imagine they would be a mess to work with).
As a side note. What some of the big boys do for feature film work (like LOTR), is use a laser scanner to scan in a high res version of the model. They then build a lower resolution model beneath, and run a script that find the differences in the surfaces and converts that into a displacement map. I guess something similair could be done for game characters, where you build a higher res model and bake the details into the textures of a lower res one.
Ragnar
When I used the Microscribe, we used a beta version of Rhino (this was before Rhino 1.0), which would get us curves we could then make surfaces from and import into SoftImage3D. We didn't use point cloud data, as we were going to use NURBS for the models. (Point clouds was an option too, but I imagine they would be a mess to work with).
As a side note. What some of the big boys do for feature film work (like LOTR), is use a laser scanner to scan in a high res version of the model. They then build a lower resolution model beneath, and run a script that find the differences in the surfaces and converts that into a displacement map. I guess something similair could be done for game characters, where you build a higher res model and bake the details into the textures of a lower res one.
Ragnar