123D Catch

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frankv

5678 posts

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#161913 23-Jan-2015 09:24

Hi,

Just wanted to share this nifty Autodesk app + website with GZers (GeeZers?).

123D Catch is a free app that lets you create 3D scans of virtually any object.

Available for Android, Apple, Windows.

You take 20-70 photos of an object from different angles, upload them to the site, wait for quite a while, and it will (hopefully) produce a 3D object model. I say hopefully because so far I've only had one success out of 4 attempts. It seems to me (so far) that it doesn't cope well with building a full 3D model of an object. But, if you take photos of an object over a range of only 180 degrees rather than 360, it does produce good 3D images that can be viewed from many angles, rotated etc.

Anyone else playing with this, or similar software? My particular interest is in using it is to make 3D models of objects for 3D printing.

Frank

DravidDavid

1907 posts

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#1240711 17-Feb-2015 11:43

Very cool!

Downloading the app now. It will be interesting to see the topology of the object it creates. I use Autodesk Maya quite a bit.

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frankv

5678 posts

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#1240771 17-Feb-2015 12:34

I've about given up on 123D Catch after several attempts. A few comments...

123D Catch seems to get confused with fully 3D objects... i.e. it doesn't generate anything if you take photos from all directions. It seems to work OK if your photos span 180 degrees or less.

The processing is done at the web site, so you have to upload all your hi-res photos and wait for a result. This seems to be a very slow process... many minutes to hours.

I think the processing is all done based on the images... it doesn't use the really useful information for the phone's directional sensors.

Trimensional (IOS only ATM :() does the same thing, using position sensors. And there's Google's Project Tango.

You have no control of any kind of how 123D Catch does the processing. It just gives you a result... take it or leave it. I must say that the result is good (except for fully 3D scans). Or it gives you nothing at all.

There's cross-platform open source software which does the same thing, faster, on your own PC, with a user interface to manage it. But you do need to learn how to use it.

ETH Zurich is working on something that runs on your phone alone.

There are programs out there to use an XBox Kinect as a 3D scanner for larger objects.