Tuesday, February 7, 2012

First try with 123D Catch

I've been wanting to give Autodesk new free beta software 123D Catch a try, and here's the first result after about 10 minutes of play!

This software lets you input pictures you have taken (I took these with my iPhone 4s) and it will then use the compute power of the Cloud to construct a 3D model from those 2D pictures.

I've seen some demos of the technology but was really psyched to see just how easy the basics are. Originally I wanted to do this with my boat after seeing a demo at SIGGRAPH in Vancouver. But it's taken me this long to get to it and the boat is now under cover. So, I decided I'd just take 10 pictures of my desktop and see what I would get.

You can see the initial model is a bit rough but I'm going to try to patch in some additional images to improve the accuracy and level of detail. I added a very simple animation path and then pushed the button to get the vidoe out you see below.

Really cool app...need to mess with it some more! You can download it and try it for free here:
http://www.123dapp.com/catch