During the first attempt at testing the Photofly technology preview, I was met with a server glitch, but in the end, all went well

  I thought one of the biggest problems was with the interface itself. I’m not sure if this is present on all systems, but with dual wide screen monitors, the first of the images (Scenes?) began very far to the right of the interface as shown in the image to the right….

  And there were no scroll bars to slide things over. It wasn’t until I started writing this article that I found out that you need to drag the thumbnails using your cursor, and I would be willing to bet via touch screen as well. Cool, but unexpected.

Creating a Scene

To begin with, I took  a bunch of images of a globe (shown in the image above) at about 10° intervals while walking around the thing. I went around three times at different levels, and wound up with 54 images. I then fired up the Photo Scene Editor…

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  It’s been 24 hours, and neither of the files sent to the Project Photofly servers have been returned. Either their server is overloaded with requests, there is a bug in the system, or possibly, I gave them the wrong email address to send the results to. If it were to be an incorrect email, it would have had to have happened twice, and that’s not likely.

 I posted in the Project Photofly discussion group, and with any luck I’ll get an answer today. I can say that from some of the posts there, some of the people are sending over 100 images, which may be overloading what is likely a smallish test system.

 Whatever the case may be, stay tuned, I’ll post an update when I have it.

 I spent most of this morning playing around with the Photo Scene Editor for Project Photofly with nothing to show for my time –so-far.

Early this morning I downloaded and installed the Photo Scene Editor for Project Photofly from the Autodesk Labs website. The program is very small, and the download and install were quick and painless.

I had seen a video by Donnie Gladfelter over at thecadgeek yesterday, and decided to re-watch it as a primer before delving into the program myself…

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(BUSINESS WIRE)–Autodesk announces the availability of Project Photofly, a technology preview of a web service that allows users to easily create 3D models from photographs using the cloud. Project Photofly is currently available for free* on Autodesk Labs.

The Autodesk Project Photofly technology preview enables architecture, design, media & entertainment and manufacturing firms to easily create 3D models from a series of photographs.

Photofly breaks the barrier to entry to image-based modeling because of its automatic calibration process. The manual calibration of photographs enabled by other technologies is complex and requires a strong expertise to get a good result. Project Photofly utilizes an automatic calibration engine, called “Camera Factory,” which is made available as a web service through a Windows-based client called “Photo Scene Editor.” Customers connect to the Camera Factory through the Photo Scene Editor, and then use their favorite Autodesk 3D modeling software (AutoCAD, Autodesk Revit, Autodesk 3ds Max, etc.) to consume the data in DWG format to model on top of the images.

“Reality capture gives designers and engineers the ability to better measure, analyze, document and plan for projects.”

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