Sunday, March 18, 2012

Kinect Real-time 3D Model Reconstruction

I just came across a interesting article in the German computer magazine c't. Just a while ago Microsoft Research Lab showed how to get a 3D scan from an object or scenery with the Kinect. Now the Austrian company PROFACTOR released their software ReconstructMe which allows us to play around with that technology as well. With this software now Real-time 3D Model Reconstruction is in our hands. Having a decent graphics card it even allows 3D capturing in real-time. And it is free for non-commercial use. Export formats include .obj and .3ds. I made a short test and scan of one of my favourite objects and then imported the scan into Blender. It's still some work to use this in a machinima movie project. The model data has a high polygon count, which has to be reduced and so far there in no texturing data grabbed.

ReconstructMe capturing the object:




Captured object imported into Blender:

2 comments:

  1. Interesting possibilities here, but I wonder if Autodesk hasn't done a better job with their free program 123D

    http://www.123dapp.com/

    The end result (using a digital camera) includes texturing data and appears to be of higher quality. I also believe that you can use the end result commercially.

    It may be that the advantage the Kinect has is primarily in motion capture, however there is still a lot of experimenting to do with the Kinect, so the future is very bright.

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    Replies
    1. Thank you Ricky for pointing towards 123D.
      Looks like a great choice for capturing
      a 3D object and with having textures as well
      already it's just perfect. I have not used it so far but I'll give it a try.

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