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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AutoCAD Plant 3D and FARO Laser Scanner Photon Are Preferred Hardware and Software Setup for Process Plant Modeling

LAKE MARY, Fla. & SAN RAFAEL, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Autodesk, Inc. (NASDAQ:ADSK), a world leader in 3D design, engineering and entertainment software, and FARO (NASDAQ:FARO), the world’s leading provider of portable measurement and imaging solutions, announced their collaboration to add direct integration of point cloud data to AutoCAD 2011software. FARO and Autodesk have also entered into an agreement for FARO to promote AutoCAD Plant 3D software as its preferred 3D modeling application for the process plant industry.

Through joint engineering and development efforts, AutoCAD 2011 allows the direct import of binary scan data from FARO Scene, FARO’s scan processing software for the FARO Laser Scanner. The introduction of a dedicated point cloud platform that seamlessly integrates into AutoCAD will allow customers to do more than ever before. AutoCAD 2011 supports up to 2 billion points, which can be used with the enhanced tools for 3D modeling to enable extremely high performance usage of the scan data.
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