Hey all,

Anyone have experience with a low cost (maybe open source) solution to create 3D geometry from photos, OR even and optical scanning? My goal is to:
- clay up rough concepts
- scan
- create final surfaces in Moi

I have seen David Laser and that looks interesting, but I'd like know of other options? Thanks!


-Dooki

Hi dooki, that process of generating 3D models from photos is called "photogrammetry" , so try searching using that term to find a bunch of stuff related to that.

Autodesk recently released something along those lines here:
http://labs.autodesk.com/utilities/photo_scene_editor/

One thing to note is that usually these apps will generate polygon mesh output and not NURBS surface output, so most of the time the data that is generated would be the kind that goes into a polygon modeling or rendering program not the kind of data that MoI works with directly.

So I guess that those probably won't quite fit the process that you're looking for if you want to bring the results into MoI - you'll need one of those kind of fancy reverse engineering solutions for constructing NURBS surface data from the polygon mesh data for that to work.

See here for some links to some of those reverse engineering apps:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=4354.4

- Michael

To give you more of an idea on what to look for - SketchUp has a feature for Photo-Matching from a single photo:

http://sketchup.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=94920

You can still take photos of the side of a structure. Use the Transform or Warp tool in Photoshop to get them square and build them up in MoI.

Thanks Micheal.
I realize that the data will be a mesh but can't I import as obj or dxf reference and rebuild surfaces with MOI? In other words, will MOI's tool be able to snap points to the scan data? Say I scan in a chess piece. The import will be obj/dxf but can I draw a contour with control points snapping to the imported model?

-Dooki

Thanks Magic. Looks cool but unfortunately I am working on organic forms and not straight sides as with architecture. Thanks though!

-Dooki

Hi dooki - well MoI does not currently import OBJ or DXF data - MoI currently is not focused on working with polygon model data at all for its own modeling workflow, only on generating polygon output at export time.

See here for some previous discussions:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=3468.2
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=1578.7
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=3044.2
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=4104.1


One thing that you can do is to use the OBJ converter program from here:
http://moi3d.com/wiki/Resources#Obj23dmWireframe_converter

That converter will read an OBJ file and then generate all of the polygon edges it finds into it as line segments in a 3DM file, then you can open that wireframe 3DM file in MoI to use as a snapping guide.

- Michael

Photosculpt http://www.photosculpt.net/ uses 2 pictures to build a model, currently focused on capturing 3d textures rather than an entire model. The developer is working to address full 360 degree capture as well as adding calibration for more accurate data. Right now there is some distortion present in the models, so its probably not best suited for this purpose, but it is something to keep an eye on.

There's a few applications here that are photo based http://www.agisoft.ru/ . One uses multiple images to construct a full 360 degree model, and another that works with image pairs.

Oooo, thank you sir!

-Dooki

Thanks Chris!

-Dooki

Maybe Project Photofly from Autodesk is also something for you.

http://labs.autodesk.com/utilities/photo_scene_editor/

Regards
Stefan

Oooo, thanks Stefan. This looks interesting.

-Dooki