Toyota Owner Lovingly Preserves His 4Runner As A Virtual 3D Diorama

As car enthusiasts, we form bonds with our cars. Strong bonds. At times, our circumstances dictate the score, and we’re forced to part with the cars we love. At other times, it’s just time to move on to something new. But when that happens, it would be nice if we had a way to remember the cars that were special to us. One Toyota owner has figured that out.

Azad Balabanian was once the proud owner of a third-generation Toyota 4Runner, lovingly known as Warthog. “It was a great little offroader,” he wrote on Twitter. It clearly left an impact on him, but some years ago, he had to sell the vehicle. Just before he let it go, though, he did something special. He took the time to create a gorgeous 3D scan, inside and out, preserving it for all time.

What Azad wound up with was a gorgeous, sunlit diorama of the vehicle he used to own. His work manages to capture the golden nostalgia of an honest-to-goodness 4Runner with the battle scars of a life well lived.

a few years ago, I painstaikingly scanned my old 4Runner right before selling it. Today I reprocessed the data as a gaussian splat

It was a great little offroader. I'll visit it in VR some day and feel like I'm sitting back in the driver seat. pic.twitter.com/GG0EdFF9j6

— Azad Balabanian ᯅ (@Azadux) November 7, 2024

Azad captured the vehicle using photogrammetry techniques. Long story short, that’s where you take a whole lot of photos of something, and then use intelligent software to stitch those photos together into a 3D model using advanced mathematical techniques referred to as “gaussian splatting.” A nice benefit of this technique is that the photos already contain all the texture data required to map on to the 3D model. From there, the 3D model can be viewed on a computer. For a greater level of immersion, the model can be visualized with a virtual reality (VR) headset, allowing one to appreciate the vehicle even more authentically.

Using a Sony a7rii with a Voigtlander 15 mm lens, Azad took a “couple hundred” images of the vehicle as it sat neatly parked in a picturesque suburban street. The images were then processed with a tool called RealityCapture, which is specifically built to create realistic 3D models from photographs or laser scan data. Azad has shared posts over the years on how to best use the software to create attractive and accurate 3D models.

Years ago, Azad shared a much simpler version of the 4Runner model on SketchFab, a website where users share 3D models of all kinds. Azad’s profile includes a wide range of scans. Much of his work covers urban scenes and places of architectural interest. However, he’s also scanned other vehicles, like a bulldozer on the beach in France, or a cute snow-covered Citroen 2CV in Berlin.

What sets the 4Runner scan apart is the level of detail, particular in the video shared on Twitter. That’s partly down to the use of a high-quality DSLR to take shots of the vehicle. It’s also notable in that Azad was able to capture the vehicle both inside and out. Azad was able to pull this off while working around the problem of the vehicle’s windows. They’re reflective but also transparent, and they can make photogrammetry quite difficult. I’ve reached out out to Azad for more details on how he was able to overcome this challenge.

The interior in particular is exquisite. It instantly gives you the feeling of sitting in a 1990s Toyota, right down to the chewed-up center console and ribbed cloth seats. You can practically feel the steering wheel and gear shift, just from the texture and detail in which they’ve been captured. Other authentic touches include the bag in the back, along with some dents visible on the rear end. They all tell the story, not of a 4Runner, but of this 4Runner. Azad’s 4Runner. The tale of what it’s done and where it’s been, encoded as scratches, dents, and rock chips on the body.

It’s not perfect, of course. The photogrammetry process does leave some artifacts here and there, and if you look really closely, you’ll see some odd bits of geometry or texturing. Overall, though, as a personal touchstone, the authenticity level is right up there. It’s because the details that make this car unique are right there, right down to the cheeky “WARTHOG” badge on the back. A 3D model of a standard 4Runner wouldn’t be nearly as meaningful.

Azad is pretty good at this stuff, that much is obvious. With that said, the tools mentioned above are all out there and available. There’s nothing stopping you from trying to make your own 3D scans of your cars, too. You might really enjoy it, and you’ll get a keepsake out of it to boot.

The reality is that very few of us get to keep all of the cars we hold dear. Many of us keep cherished memories, photos, and mementos of the cars we’ve loved and lost. In that same way, it’s easy to appreciate this work as a rich diorama of a charming vehicle in the world it used to live in.

Image credits: Azad Balabanian via Twitter screenshot, Sketchfab via screenshot