Show HN: 123D Catch by AutoDesk – Create 3D scans of virtually any object

Principally it uses VisualSFM and Meshlab, both of which came to life as testbeds for algorithm research but are now useful in their own right. By all accounts 123D Catch does an excellent job, but is quite rigid in its workflow. Apparently it uses the engine from Acute3D's considerably more expensive Smart3DCapture.

Sadly neither VisualSFM or 123D Catch are usable for commercial work because of license and copyright problems respectively.

What happened in the interim?

[1] http://blog.123dapp.com/2011/12/3d-scanning-for-posterity

Cleverly enough, it doesn't prompt you to do so until after you've taken the 10-20-however-many pictures of your object. I suspect this would make a hell of a difference over a login screen upon launch or capture.

This was called "Photo Fly" before when it was a "Autodesks Labs project" and I belive the tech originates from when autodesk bought the french software company RealViz that made the software Photomodeler.

It's reasonably good if you take an organized set of pictures for it. A clean background behind the object of interest helps. The object has to have lots of edges for the algorithm to match; sculptured surfaces like cars may not match well. For some purposes, projecting a pattern of dots or lines onto the object is helpful. (The original Kinect did something similar).

Programs for this have been around for years. Most of the improvements have been in doing a better job of guessing about areas where matching edge info isn't available.

https://beta.autodesk.com/callout/?callid=D69655022B4F42C880...

everyone praise every shenangan. companies couldnt care less about integration and dat portability, etc.