Photofly: mesh for photographers?

Mesh seems to be emerging slowly onto the SL main grid and I am sure it will not be long in reaching OpenSim either in a more finished form. Doubtless many will be polishing their Blender skills in anticipation or scouring TurboSquid and similar sites for free content. Ever wishing to be different, I am still looking for simple tools that generate useful, albeit amateur, content without months of dedicated training. Such an approach should be accessible to non-specialist students as well.

Molecule meshes, you may recall, can be generated using UCSF Chimera which exports formats compatible with MeshLab (which reads PDB files directly as well). I also looked previously at Sculptris which takes a rather elemental "ball of clay" approach.

The latest tool I am playing with is Autodesk Photofly. In contrast to Sculptris, this works from multiple photographs of the same scene or object so the object must already exist ( have yet to try an inworld scene). You can also generate a movie for upload to YouTube. The door and steps in the picture above are a crude example of what can be done. Image capture was done on my humble laptop so quality is lost there as well.

Significant caveat: Photofly is in beta in Autodesk Labs and presently free to use once you register. That may change; it could become paid-for or disappear entirely.

The process itself is straightforward: take pictures (lots), load the images into Photofly, stitch them (in the cloud), refine the draft mesh that is returned (much tinkering required but omitted here), generate an improved mesh (in the cloud) and then export in .obj format with accompanying UV texture. This can then be processed using MeshLab to COLLADA .dae format for upload to OpenSim or SL.

The steps and doorway shown in the image above are actually the unrefined draft mesh for one of the example image sets as the cloud rendering failed at the recommended quality for some reason.

I had to revert to Kirsten's Viewer 21(7A) in order to import to OpenSim 0.7.1.1 running as sim-on-a-stick. I suspect that most third-party viewers will focus on SL for mesh in the short-term but support will emerge for OpenSim in due course. I also had issues with the mesh physics/bounding box and was unable to make the mesh phantom, the usual fallback position. Again, this will be fixed, I am sure.

As ever, this is not entirely a first. There has been some discussion of Photofly in the SL forums, including mention of alternatives. While still not simple enough for some purposes, PhotoFly and its ilk could lead to a more rapid adoption of mesh than many anticipate, at least for certain uses.