Shoe

An experiment in photos to 3D

Shoe is an example of a random thought I had of, “I wonder how real it would look if I took a hundred photos of one of my shoes and processed it through Autodesk Recap’s photo-to-3D system. I had no need for a 3D shoe at the time, but I now have some direct practical experience in case one day a museum approaches me with a delicate artifact they’d like digitised into an interactive 3D model that kids can view up close on a big touch screen or an iPad at home.

The video here will show you the results, but as a quick summary: it came out with a crazy complicated mesh of 1,344,878 polygons, which is way too many for anything useful in real-time, but it’s definitely worth exploring further as a possible starting point to later retopologise (reduce polygons, arranging edges better, etc).

I’d like to look further into this, comparing the workflow and results of refining a photo-to-3D model compared to sculpting the same artifact in 3D from scratch.