Photoscan

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This might be interesting to some, especially since the beautiful game "The Vanishing of Ethan Carter" uses this technique to achieve stunning visuals.

Anyone can pick this up (free trial) and play around with it. You need a decent camera and the better the lightning the better the result (basically). This post is however not really a tutorial or anything since I don't have time to explain the steps.

The software is called Agisoft Photoscan. And no, you don't need any fancy geo-location lasers or an infrared camera.

Basically:
You take a bunch of pictures of your desired place, object, person or whatever. The more pictures the better, but it will also take longer to process. I did a scan of my desk with about 140 pictures and it didn't turn out too great - probably needed at least 300+ to achieve something decent. The below uses 29 pictures, but is only "one face", i.e. it isn't technically fully three dimensional. The software more or less does the rest. (A project with ~30 pictures like the one posted here takes about 30 minutes to process on my machine, using low-to-medium pre-set settings for mesh, texture and mapping.)

Dense Point Cloud (29 entities/photos, 100,774 points):


Dense Point Cloud (with base texture):


Wireframe Base (44,924 faces):


Shaded Mesh:


Shaded Mesh (with low-res base texture):


Textured Mesh (High-res, 8192 x 8192 px):


Close up:




Finished render 5.54MiB (compressed textures, compressed mesh):


Download (right click, save target as): https://db.tt/JfBm9lbR
(Update to latest Adobe Reader and it should display just fine.)

Original scan (one of 29 pictures):



So, what use is this to your average Joe? Well, next time you visit something you want to capture, say like a historical site, you snap 100-200 pictures on site and then recreate the entire thing at home in stunning detail. A lot cooler than a photo, don't you agree?

I will (maybe) implement this at work where it will be used to scan in products (small and big) for showcase online. It will hopefully make online shopping a little bit cooler (not to mention that you can inspect the item more thoroughly before you purchase).

Give it a try and post your results/scans!
(Should mention, the developer does recommend a decent computer to do this. At least a modern quad-core and 16GiB of RAM.)