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by MrVitaliy 93 days ago
Anyone tried using lidar and just cut/measure distance to the object?
5 comments

Apparently they used something similar for production on avatar: stereo cameras for depth estimation which allowed realtime depth composition of CG characters onto the shots they were taking, which makes it a lot easier to get everyone on the same page about the scene, especially with characters that are outside normal human proportions. But it wasn't good enough for the final shots.
Well there was ZCam, which was a time-of-flight add-on for ENG cameras. It couldn't really handle edges perfectly and existing bluescreen tech was good enough for TV production, so they pivoted into gaming and sold to Microsoft for the Kinect.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZCam (Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7Kcmx29RCE )

That would require calibration with the camera, and even then the camera and lidar sensor can’t be in exactly the same place. I doubt results would be better.
Well sort of, the industry tried to go way beyond that by capturing the entire light field: https://techcrunch.com/2016/04/11/lytro-cinema-is-giving-fil...
per pixel depth does not solve for semi-transparency.