Bardic on 16/12/2006 at 22:50

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I saw a program the other day for turning 2d medical data into 3d object. Then found some things that a French company is doing to make very detailed 3d buildings for Google Earth. So far nothing that seemed usable, or even seemed to take any standard picture types, but it was looking promising.

I have finally found some info on Photomodeler Pro (http://www.photomodeler.com/index.html) http://www.photomodeler.com/index.html that seems like it would be very nice for custom objects.

(http://www.architectureweek.com/2002/0123/tools_1-2.html) http://www.architectureweek.com/2002/0123/tools_1-2.html
has a tutorial for developing 3D models from photos. Take pictures and mark points that show up on 2 or more pictures, and the program extrapolates the 3d object from them.

I'm just curious if other people use programs like this for their 3DS max projects, or does anyone know how well this or other Photogrammetry programs work for modelling objects?

Bumbleson on 9/1/2007 at 00:41

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I use Photomodeler from time to time, but it's very time-consuming to implement larger projects. You have to do a lot of thinking to take suitable pictures and depending on the amount of detail you want in the resulting model, you might have to take a LOT of pictures of the object from many different angles.

There's an outdated "Lite" version of Photomodeler, but it's only useful for very simple projects. If you need detail and accuracy (and you WILL need that), you absolutely need the "Pro" version.
It has much more functions to support the modeling process and the camera calibration. For example, there's an absolutely ingenious spline drawing function. You simply mark a complex edge with a spline curve on two or more (previously oriented) photos and Photomodeler calculates the orientation of the curve in space. You can then model complex surfaces from these and ohter types of lines.
But for this to work you will - again - need many pictures taken from the right angles and do a lot of handwork marking and referencing points to reach an acceptable level of accuracy. Otherwise Photomodeler might miscalculate the whole thing and you'll end up with a big mess. Sometimes one or two bad points are enough to spoil it all. Of course you can correct that kind of mistakes, but it all needs a lot of time.

But there are other programs which may be a better choice, especially for organic models. With these programs you also take pictures from different angles, but the calculation is different and mostly automated. You place the object on a sheet of paper on which you've printed a reference grid. The grid must be visible on the photos. The program can then auto-orient the photos by analyzing the grid. All you have to do then is to mark the silhouette of the object on each photo. The program then calculates the orientation of each silhouette in space and can create a polygon model by "skinning" the silhouette frame.
Unfortunately this method is only suitable for a limited number of object types. Especially closed concave parts of an object (like the inside of a plate or vase for example) can not be captured with this technique. But it seems to be a great alternative for irregularly formed objects.

One of these programs is named iModeller. You can find it on (http://www.imodeller.com). There's also a tutorial available showing the principle.

Another one is D-Sculptor: (http://www.d-vw.com/dsculptor/about/about_d_sculptor.htm)

And another one: 3DSOM (http://www.3dsom.com/)

Ziemanskye on 16/1/2007 at 11:13

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As long as you've got "friends" willing to draw on your head :p