Using Photoscan on a car

I decided to try out Photoscan on a car model to see how it could cope, and the answer is not too bad.  At first I took the photos on a relatively plain table top and the software seemed to have trouble aligning photos from the two sides of the car, it seemed to do one side ok but any shots of the opposite side it got confused with.  I just placed a magazine under the car so each side was more unique and that solved the issue.

I used about 30 shots here, basically 2 sets of 12 at different heights and roughly 30 degree intervals and then a few more from higher and lower down to try and capture data where the bumper overhangs.  The geometry was generated with the 'Smooth' method at the high quality level &1mil polys, it took about 2 hours to churn through it...

At first the geometry doesn't seem all that accurate (the Mr. Fusion has fared quite badly!) but when you combine it with the texture as well it actually does a pretty convincing job.  (Yes, I used a 2004 copy of Edge magazine as a marker.  Yes, my Delorean model is signed by Christopher Lloyd ;)  I think a better setup for capturing the model on a plain grey background with consistent lighting should help the software capture more of the details.

I brought the data into Modo to do some renders, this is just the raw undecimated data imported straight in. I think with not too much cleaning up you could quickly end up with a pretty good 3d reference model, perhaps using the background constrain function to lay clean polys on top of this dense mesh to block out the main dimensions.

My next challenge is to try and capture a cat...they tend to not be quite as cooperative as cars though!