Originally shared by Phil Nolan
Did you know you can make a 3D model of real objects you have without needing any special equipment? With just a normal camera you can shoot many images of every angle of an object and have software compile them together into a 3D object. This is called Photogrammetry. There are several expensive software packages that do it and also a simpler limited tool called 123D Catch from Autodesk. While limited in features that one is good if you have a low end computer because it does all of the work on their servers.
For this model I used free open source software (FOSS) called VisualSFM and MeshLab. I found a great tutorial on the process which you can see here:
http://wedidstuff.heavyimage.com/index.php/2013/07/12/open-source-photogrammetry-workflow/#comment-1768
One thing that they missed in the tutorial and I figured out myself is that you need to download another tool called CMVS and simply extract the files into the same folder as Visual FSM. You can get that from here:
http://www.di.ens.fr/cmvs/
It’s best to shoot as many pictures as you can, making sure they are in focus so you can see all of the details. For this model I shot 63 photos. For even lighting you can do it outside on a cloudy day.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNA9xtMtT2Q