I’m a newbie and just wondering about some of the more realistic looking models in the 3d Warehouse. How do people make these models with textures perfectly positioned and wrapped around an organic shaped surface?
For just one example:
Thank you for clues and advice
These are typically photo or laser scans of people or objects, with the real photo scan then mapped onto a lower resolution mesh.
You can do this pretty much with a modern smartphone but many companies will have some sort of rig setup usually consisting of multiple cameras in a sphere around the object.
This would be a high end rig but would allow you to be scanning a lot of people and poses very quickly, probably make the money back quite quick
The scanned model is then optimized and converted into SketchUp format.
Well, beware. It might be a “lower resolution mesh” but the statistics still ought to discourage one from building a crowd out of them
Indeed, I meant low resolution compared to the scan data, that would usually be several million polygons at least. You can use something like SubD or Artisan tools (plugin) to reduce this mesh even more and still keep the map potentially, if you are not rendering that it should work out fine in SketchUp 
