3D scan mesh + basic game engine

Hi everyone,
I'm new here so I'm introducing myself quickly. I'm a French designer based in Chicago, doing lots of digital things, interested in lots of new digital things and especially mixing these things together. If I was better in code I would consider myself as a creative technologist but I still have to learn a lot I guess.

I'm working a lot with kinect and point clouds and I would like to create a very basic game engine, FPS style, inside a 3D scan previously recorded with the kinect.
Imagine a MUCH simpler version of this : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UXZO_AWQxg
Ideally, I would be interested to embed the 'game' into a browser like these http://unity.multiplayer3d.com/

My question is more technical than anything else at this point as I can't afford to spend weeks working on this - and I'm a total noob
I'm already able to capture 3D scans with kinect then importing the point clouds into MeshLab. If needed I have a couple of friends/colleagues mastering 3DS Max (if it helps, maybe..).
About the 'game', even having the possibility to navigate in the 3D scan with basic gravity (not a fly mode) and FPS control (move, crouch, jump) that would be awesome and a good motivation for continuing the project and create a real gameplay.

Any comment is welcome, thanks a lot.

 

Is this Unity-related in any way?

--Eric

 

If you give unity3d the models in a game friendly format, then sure it's a piece of cake to add in a simple controller to allow the user to walk around in U3D.

The hard part is taking point clouds and turning them into useful models - but it sounds like you have got that covered.

 

Well Unity doesn't natively support point clouds, though I guess you could simulate through particles or if you had pro hook into opengl and use point sprites. However the best approach will be to triangulate the point clouds in other software and import them as meshes.

Saying that you may find RGBDemo interesting, as its constructing meshes from real-time kinect point clouds. Its nothing to do with Unity, you can't use it in Unity directly and i've not had the time to look into it in much detail myself, but if you are interested in using real-time kinect scans, it would be a good place to start.

 

Thanks NPSF3000, that's useful. I wanted to be sure that this part (game control) was easy to achieve without a deep knowledge in Unity.

The hard part is indeed to transform the raw data from the point cloud into an friendly model for unity.
- Even if I manage to optimize the mesh, it will still be pretty heavy. So are the game examples of the gallery relevant for me in terms of number of poly/models and performance in general ? I just want to have an idea of the limitation of Unity and feasibility of the project in general.
- And is embedding the game into a browser a difficult thing to achieve ? (both for me and for the future user in terms of performances)

edit: Thanks Noisecrime, I know RGB D already that's a great piece of software, I think the 3D scans I use are a bit more accurate though. But my questions were more on the Unity part and feasability of the project (I don't want to piss off the moderators haha)

 

My experience with 3d scanners (I use Artec Eva) shows me, that turning point clouds to mesh in not the biggest problem. My scanner can export a mesh (obj format), but it definitely is not ready for a game engine. Geometry is too complex uv map is a real mess, texture is one map only (all in complex). So the process is to make a retopology, create a proper uv map, bake normal and diffuse map. Then you should use the diffuse map as a base to create texture maps for the specified game engine (unity in this case). Create rigging and animation, if needed. And only after this the model is ready...