Discussions

It is a little off topic but I thought many of the forum goers might find the Photosynth to 3D process I've been working on useful for creating 3D models from aerial photos.  The process is pretty simple and FREE:

·         Gather images with a lot of overlap (like most of our aerial shots)

·         Upload the files to http://www.photosynth.net (or use the open source Bundler app http://phototour.cs.washington.edu/bundler/ )

·         Use this exporter to extract the point cloud http://pspcexporter.codeplex.com/

·         Use a product like Meshlab  http://www.meshlab.net/ (hard to get good results) or VrMesh Studio ( http://www.vrmesh.com/products/overview.asp  ) to generate a mesh surface from the point cloud.

Here are two examples from my work in Ecuador and West Texas:

https://www.youtube.com/user/mdwillis01#p/a/u/0/2-oK5lnNA-I

and

https://www.youtube.com/user/mdwillis01#p/u/6/nJgvLll57f0 (only part of this one was done with Photoysnth).

The images were captured from kite and balloon platforms but the same workflow should work for any series of photographs.

Also, here is a Google Earth file with some of the same data http://70.114.146.89/~mwillis/Puchara_Grande.kmz (~10 Mb).  My linux box connection is slow. It'll take a bit to download.

-Mark