The Henley Club: Planning an exhibition in VR

In July 2018 The Henley Club invited me to put on a photography exhibition in their amazing open warehouse space in Rankins Lane in Melbourne’s CBD.

It was the perfect opportunity to use Photogrammetry (3D scanning) to recreate the space in Virtual Reality first and plan it before printing my pieces for the real exhibition.

Below you will find an interactive Sketchfab 3D model of the 3D scanned gallery which I’ve populated with the photography pieces I placed in virtual reality I then printed and set up in regular reality for the exhibition. Additionally there are some videos and photos showing how this was done, and my interacting in the VR gallery placing my photography etc.

I recommend viewing this sketchfab model in Full screen and HD.

Photography of Chris Staring @ the Henley Club
by SkareMedia
on Sketchfab

Photogrammetry scan

I scanned the club by taking more than 700 photographs of the interior.

I thought the scan would take me about an hour, however it ended up taking about 5 hours due to the low lighting conditions inside the club which meant I had to use a slow shutter speed of 3-5 seconds for each photo.

Photo processing & Reality Capture

I took the 700+ photos, applied some basic colour correction and adjustments and then fed them into Reality Capture which aligns the photos in 3D space, calculates the geometry and projects the photorealistic textures back onto the 3D model.

Calculating the 3D model from the photos took about 8 hours. I also had to learn the software along the way having only previously used Agisoft Photoscan for Photogrammetry scans.

Scan cleanup

The 3D model generated in Reality Capture had a few problems which I then had to clean up in a few 3D programs including Meshmixer, Cinema 4D and ZBrush.

I also had to remove some previous artwork from the walls which took a lot longer than expected due to the messy UV texture map generated in Reality Capture. It would have been much easier to just remove the artwork from the walls before doing the scan, but I intentionally left them up so I could lean the process of removing and modifying textures.

Some of the problem areas in the scan included the large table, the chandelier, floorboards and some of the furniture due to the reflective surfaces and no paying enough attention to details, however the scan came out better than expected for the purpose I needed it for.

Unity & VR

After cleaning up the model and textures I pulled it into Unity and built a simple game engine which allowed me to walk around inside the gallery in Virtual Reality at 1:1 scale. I was also able to add/remove/move/scale my artwork around the room to figure out the optimal layout for my exhibition.

Having not touched Unity for several years and having never developed for VR meant that I had a whole lot of catching up to do to get the application/game up and running, but fter a few evenings of tinkering around I was up and running.

RL & VR comparison

Once I was happy with the setup in VR I used the measurements to print out the pieces at the correct sizes and then set up the gallery using the VR as a guide. I was even able to use the unity project to figure out the exact measurements between pieces, heights etc.

The final step was to upload the model and my photography to Sketchfab to be immortalised on the interwebs so that anyone could check it out, even in VR if they happen to have a headset handy. There are 20 annotations around the room which gives you more information about the club and my photography.