first off, I apologize if this is the wrong place to post this..

I currently work for a company that does 3D engineering Design for aerospace, and one of our up and coming core competencies is low cost 3D scanning. we own a handheld scanning device that can replicate real world objects into 3D representations within minutes.

I believe this is a technology that can be used to create game assets such as supplying Hi-end scans for faces, cars, guns, and pretty much anything else that can then be converted into usable 3d models. my problem is that we have, until now, only been involved in aerospace design, and I am unsure how to move into the gaming industry with this.

I have submitted our company for a contractor page on gamasutra, but they don't really have a category that fits this situation, and I'm worried about getting lost in the list of other 3d modeling companies. also just being able to talk to someone in the industry to determine if this tech would be a benefit would be hugely helpful as well.

any advice would be greatly appreciated

Just as a heads up: some game dev companys already started using the tech.

The creator of World of Tanks, a russian Tank sim/arcade game, started using different scanning techniques when moving to "HD" models... most models are still done manually, but it seems for some models they started using "photogrammetry", where they took many pics of a tank from all sides and used software to convert it into a 3D Model.

AFAIK, the biggest road block for them, and the reason why they only use this kind of scanning only for a selected few of the remodelled vehicles is because a) the time it takes to get all the needed image data, and b) the difficulty getting tank museums worldwide to agree getting their guys onsite, having some hours of access to the vehicle and being able to use it for photogrammetry.

It seems there is all kind of childish behaviour involved on both sides, besides realworld politics now with the east-west relationship becoming more frosty recently. And then there are idiots from hollywood borrowing a sherman tank for creating the fury movie from the british bovington museum, and managing to break the tracks on an irrepacable historical vehicle. No wonder museums are getting more anxious to let the entertainment industry near their vehicles.

Long story short: from what I heard from the dev talks from WG, this particular company is very open to new ways of creating the base 3D models as with the current push for ever higher polycounts and more detailled models, manually creating models gets ever more expensive.

But they need the quickest and least intrusive way of scanning available as they are dealing with historical vehicles, and even then they might have difficulties really using the tech in many cases because of differen reasons.

Often a blueprint is all they can get, be it because of lacking cooperation from the vehicle owners, or because no vehicle has survived or was ever built.

Don't know if that helps, I haven't heard from any other company that uses 3D scanning (though I guess the competition (Warthunder, Armoured Warfare) might also have experimented with 3D Scanning methods).

unfortunately until working with games is a proven thing for us, there is no budget to attend game dev shows..

my hope is that with the hand held scanner we can offer companies a cheaper, less time consuming and less intrusive method of getting scans (when needed) and being defense contractors, we might have an easier time getting access to things such as tanks.

I've sent out a few emails to indy devs who have made use of photogrammetry in the past, just to inquire about the process more.

I am grateful for the responses. thanks!

being defense contractors, we might have an easier time getting access to things such as tanks.

That might not really help... the games I mentioned are trying to get in as much different vehicles as possible, so from as many different nations as possible. If you are a defense contractor for a particular country, that might actually be contraproductive when trying to scan vehicles from a different country or military, especially still active ones.

In this case you might be better off not mentioning your affilation with the military, or use a subsidiary just to make sure people in russia will not get the wrong impression if your contract is with the US military, and you are sent to the Kubinka museum to scan a vehicle.

Also, mentioning active vehicles, I have a hard time imaging that the military would let you scan still active vehicles. AFAIK they also prevent people from measuring things like armour thickness (which is commonly done for historical vehicles) for obvious reasons (armour and other details are classified information, even some time after retirement of a vehicle), so I don't know how they react if somebody gets too close to the vehicle with a 3D Scanner.

But this gets slightly offtopic...

very good points. to be honest I hadn't even really considered working internationally, and I should really know better with regard to the military related stuff. but all that aside. we currently are using the scanner for reverse-engineering aircraft components and tooling fixtures, but the work load is inconsistent and we want to find as many applications for this as possible. supposedly there is only about 600 of these scanners floating around right now, so we want to capitalize on it before they become more common.

thanks again, this has given me a bit to think about before I really proceed further

there is no budget to attend game dev shows

No money for marketing and networking? That's going to severely limit your growth.

It depends on the product and market, but for most industries 5% to 10% of your revenue to marketing is just barely enough to stay flatline. The number for growth is usually higher. In games, the number for growth on a new product is often between 30% to 50% of expected revenue.

When I was first learning how much money goes toward marketing I thought it was insanely high. $2M here, $5M there. Even when we were selling radar-style sensors at one company I couldn't fathom why the marketing and networking budget was bigger than R&D budget when we had only finished two proof-of-concept devices. But then I gained some business sense, I learned what it really takes to convince people to buy a product even when they have a need for it.

Though it is not tasteful for engineers, companies looking to grow really do need to spend an enormous amount of money on marketing and networking. If you want to enter a new market like games you will need to invest quite a lot of focused money and focused efforts to gain market awareness.

I don't know a huge amount about 3D scanning but recently at a consumer expo I went to there were at least 10 companies demoing and selling various types of 3D scanner aimed at the average amateur hobbyist. These were all at sub £1000 prices. They were all predicting that along with 3D printers it would be big business in the next couple of years.
If it takes off the same way 3D printers have then I'd expect to be able to buy a hand held 3D scanner for less than £200 in a couple of years time.

Now I'm not saying that some companies wouldn't pay for a professional scanning service (in the same way people still pay for professional printing) and I really wouldn't know the difference between a cheap consumer 3D scanner and the "suitable for aerospace" equipment that your company has.

I'm just wondering given the choice why wouldn't the majority of games studios just buy the equipment themselves.