Mosasaur Tooth Photogrammetry

After moving away from the megalodon tooth, I chose to create a bigger fossil, a mosasaur tooth. I have realised that fossils that have a more uniform shape might be easier to create more consistently. The circular shape of the ammonite made it quite easy to connect and I thought that this would also be true of fossils on a matrix (fossils that are still partially encased in the rock they were discovered in).

This fossil had an interesting issue within 3DF Zephyr that caused the right side of the matrix to be missing in the cloud creation. I tried rotating the object but the right side was still proving difficult despite being a different part of the object.

I managed to partially fix this by using my phones torch while taking the video. I initially avoid this to allow for the natural light to light my object and avoid any unnatural colours; however, I was able to capture a well lit video after a few tries. The other attempts improved the strange issue I was having but didn't fix it completely. Eventually I managed to get a complete scan.

Because of the simplicity of the back of the fossil, it was much easier to scan and join up with the main part.

As I predicted, having the fossil on a matrix makes joining the two halves much easier to do with minimal texture issues. Any miscoloured seams were easily fixed in UE4.

I am overall very happy with this model. I think there could be some tweaking to the texture just to get the seam perfect, but with the speed I was able to create these scans and get the complete model into UE4, I was very happy after the difficulty I had with the megalodon tooth. I am especially happy with amount of detail it captured on the tooth and the shine it was able to recreate.