Here is an amazing and inspiring little video about a crazy application of 3D printing.
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About the Author
Bart Veldhuizen
I have a LONG history with Blender - I wrote some of the earliest Blender tutorials, worked for Not a Number and helped run the crowdfunding campaign that open sourced Blender (the first one on the internet!). I founded BlenderNation in 2006 and have been editing it every single day since then ;-) I also run the Blender Artists forum and I'm Head of Community at Sketchfab.
6 Comments
Pretty cool. I would think one can do this all with Blender as well.
Video the area, and use motion tracker to set up track points, then create the mesh from that.
This is brilliant! I love the lego step. The almost perfect color matching is phenomenal.
You could do this all in open-source software. To create a point cloud of the subject, use PPT-GUI (http://184.106.205.13/arcteam/ppt.php); Meshlab to create a mesh from the points; export to Blender. I'm not sure how one would get the new mesh to fit so perfectly with the original. Booleans? Snapping?
I'm so happy that there's an open-source option to the photo-to-point-cloud program. I don't have $3500 to shell out for the paid software. But there is a little problem... How would I get it to work on Mac? Will the python script work even on a non-windows system?
PPT-GUI actually runs faster on Linux than Win7 (I've tried Ubuntu), but there's no version for Mac, that I know of. However, it is open-source, so some enterprising programmer could port it....
For Macs, if you don't mind closed source, 123D Catch by Autodesk is superb, but only free as in beer. Just as good, but not licensed for commercial use is ARC3D webservice (http://homes.esat.kuleuven.be/~visit3d/webservice/v2/) which has a super slick, and well-documented pipeline with Meshlab. (I have no association with any of these programs, except that I've used them.)
I have been trying for the past couple weeks to get ppt-gui to work on Ubuntu and Windows 7, but it will not install or run on either.
Did you have to do anything special?
Sorry it took so long to reply. I'm not an expert on this, but have you checked out the following page:http://vai.uibk.ac.at/dadp/doku.php?id=ppt_loewen_en ?
If that doesn't work, head over to the arc-team's website (http://www.arc-team.com/) for email info (they work a lot with PPT_GUI and are very friendly and helpful).