Creaform Presents the Inukshuk Project

Olympic fever has long been burning from coast to coast to coast, and Creaform staff had it bad. Last December, a scanning team made the trip to Vancouver and paid a visit to the Inukshuk standing on English Bay, near Stanley Park, and scanned the entire 6-metre-tall stone statue using 2 of the VIUscan, the Handyscan 3D laser scanner that acquires both geometry and texture.

Jérôme Baillargeon, a member of the 2-man scanning team, was impressed: “Only when I was a few centimetres away from this symbol did I realize what it truly means. It was because of honourable age-old values, very different from those prevailing nowadays, that people built such structures.”

Once scanning was complete, computer graphics artists worked with the 3D scan model to put it in context. “I wanted to show the origin of the symbol by showing winter and the lifestyle of the indigenous people,” said Louis-Philippe Gendron, Artistic Director on the project. “I wanted to emphasize the importance of forests in Canada, the enormous trees, the importance of nature and its central position in the indigenous cultures.”

According to Maxime Davignon, Project Manager, “The main steps in this project were to first scan the statue in 3D, to retouch the topology so that we would be able to make it move, and then to create a short animation film that would explain the origins of the logo.”

Scanning the Inukshuk was made easy by the versatility and portability of the Handyscan 3D laser scanner used, although it did involve an aerial platform to reach the uppermost features. The cold weather on English Bay was also quite a challenge for the scanning team. The Creaform team has experience using textured 3D scan models for multimedia animations, so retouching the topology and animating the 3D scan model was a fun way to flex those muscles.