Project Photofly 2.0 Now Available

Project Photofly 2.0 has landed. Are you surprised?

Many of you saw an early version of this technology at Autodesk University. Some of you read about the improvements we demonstrated at TED. Recently you may have watched the videos I posted. Now Project Photofly is ready for your feedback.

Project Photofly is our free technology preview of a service that converts your sets of photographs into a 3D model. With a common point and shoot digital camera, if you follow our shooting guidelines, you can take a handful of photographs and the service will construct a 3D model from the photographs. The Photo Scene Editor is small application you install on your computer to use Project Photofly. Once you have your digital photographs, you can use the Photo Scene Editor to upload them to the Project Photofly server and work with the 3D model that Project Photofly creates for you. Project Photofly harnesses the power of cloud computing to translate the photos into accurate 3D models. You can download this free technology preview from the Autodesk Labs site.

Download Photo Scene Editor for Project Photofly 2.0

If you have worked with Project Photofly before, you will want to know what’s new in Project Photofly 2.0. Some of the new features this update includes (ordered according to my favorites):

• The photo scenes are constructed with 3D meshes in addition to point clouds. Instead of having your photographs affixed to points in the scene, there are triangles to which your photos are texture mapped. The result is a more realistic looking 3d model.
  
  
  
  "I'm a little teapot, short and stout. Here is my handle, here is my spout..." The initial mesh returned by the service is a draft mesh. You can click a button to request it at a higher resolution.

• With the click of a button, you can post a video of your 3d model to YouTube. You can define an animation path or use the default - which basically walks through all of your photographs.
  
  

  If you do not wish to publish straight to YouTube, you can export your video to your computer.
  
  

• In addition to posting a video to YouTube, you can now export in a wider variety of file formats.
  
  
  
  Project Photofly allows you to share your models with others through YouTube and Autodesk’s free Inventor Publisher Mobile Viewer application for the iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch. When exporting a DWG, only reference geometry that you have added to the photo scene is included. If you wish to export the point cloud, you would export to LAS. Exporting to OBJ file includes the mesh and textures.

• The process for manual stitching has been made more accurate.
  
  

So please give our newest technology preview a shot and let us know what you think at [email protected] or the Project Photofly discussion forum. When considering a home renovation or making something as a hobbyist, a 3D model of what you are going to build is a great place to start.

Making 3D photo scenes from 2D photos is alive in the lab.