20+ Years of Design, Technology & More
20+ Years of Design, Technology & More
While capturing 3D geometry with a standard digital camera is challenging and takes advanced technology, capturing 3D geometry underwater can be even more difficult. Difficult because of the optical changes and physical demand to operate in subsurface environment while trying…
Sly Lee is a Marine Ecologist and Toxicologist that has been exploring the use of technology to document coral and the marine ecosystem. Currently Sly is using photos of corals to generate 3D models using Autodesk Recap Photo to document…
If you will be in San Francisco on February 6th, 2014 and love design and movies like me, then you better grab a ticket to one of the hottest monthly events in the city, Autodesk Design Night. The tickets go really fast for the Design Night events.
The February Design Night theme is Making Movie Magic so you should expect all the cool magic that is used behind the scenes with guest speakers like Rich McBride, VFX supervisor on the movie Gravity.
For six decades and three generations, the Leakey family has dedicated themselves to uncovering, understanding and promoting the story of our origins. They have been systematically discovering evidence of our ancestry in East Africa. The Leakey team have collected thousands of fossils of human ancestors and other animals, as well as stone tools and other artifacts that are stored permanently in the National Museums of Kenya and at the Turkana Basin Institute (www.turkanabasin.org).
Aware of the general inaccessibility of these national treasures in their current locations, Dr. Louise Leakey, a third generation of the ‘fossil hunter’ family, took it upon herself to find a way to make them globally accessible for educators, kids, and science enthusiasts. Inspired by the possibilities presented by new capture and digitization technologies, about two years ago Dr. Louise Leakey began a fruitful collaboration with Autodesk (www.autodesk.com). Together, the team captured 3D digital models of the most significant fossils, and built a beautiful, interactive web site to host them.
Kean Walmsley a friend and colleague of mine here at Autodesk wrote a nice blog post on his Through the Interface blog about something near and dear to my digital heart - capturing 3D geometry with textures using a aerial drones.
Checkout Kean's blog article on the latest cool drone 3D capture involving the Matterhorn located in beautiful Switzerland as well as processing drone captured imagery in Autodesk ReCap Photo. Running drone-captured data through ReCap Photo
AutodeskSan Francisco Bay Bridge New Span Completed – Experience the Time Lapse has offices all around the world but the crown jewel is the One Market in San Francisco with a beautiful view of the Ferry Terminal, embarcadero as well as the Bay Bridge. For 5 years and at a cost of around 6.5 billion US dollars the new span has just been completed to replace the aged old span that was prone to potential failures during earthquakes something the Bay Area is known to experience.
Experience the over 42,000 hours of construction of the 2.2 mile span in under four minutes. http://youtu.be/GDUIYZKlknk
In many cases architecture, design, engineering, and construction are art! Check out more examples including a behind the scenes exhibit on the Bay Bridge at Autodesk Gallery at One Market (http://usa.autodesk.com/gallery/) that is open to the public every Wednesday and Friday.
An updated Autodesk ReCap Photo is now available. Create high quality professional grade 3D models from photos including high resolution TIFF images. http://bit.ly/12j2Zph. This is the product that is the professional higher resolution version of the extremely popular consumer focused Autodesk Photofly which then became the current Autodesk 123D Catch which is free.
Recently I visited with my friend Brock down at Fossilogic and captured some of his rare fossils in 3D using only my digital camera and then processing the photos using Autodesk ReCap Photo. One was of a Woolly Mammoth and the other a spiral tooth shark. Both of these as well as many others Brock works on for museums are the original fossils. The Spiral Tooth Shark (Helicoprion) was found stuck in a coal seam in a Utah coal mine and I am told many fossils are found in these coal mines after all coal is remnants of ancient plant material.
Spiral Tooth Shark Fossil 3D Model Created by Photos Processed in Autodesk ReCap PhotoSpiral Tooth Shark Fossil TIFF Photos to be Processed in Autodesk ReCap Photo
Using only 38 high resolution TIFF photos to automatically create a highly detailed 3D model and export the 3D geometry with textures to OBJ format and open in 3ds Max in minutes is amazing. There is no way I could accurately model some objects in 3D and texture them in the short time it takes to photograph and process them in Autodesk online image based modeling service Autodesk ReCap Photo.
Download Free Trial of ReCap Pro.
Create intelligent 3D data from photos and scans
Autodesk® ReCap™ delivers powerful and easy to use workflow on the desktop and in the cloud to create intelligent 3D models from laser scans and captured photos. Rather than beginning with a blank sheet, Autodesk ReCap now enables any designer, architect or engineer to add, modify, validate and document their design process in context from existing environments.
Autodesk ReCap Pro
Cut project time in half with ReCap Pro by eliminating the need for registration targets. Accurately and reliably register scans by simply snapping them together using visible features that overlap. Targets are still supported but not required. ReCap Pro also makes it easy to clean, organize and visualize massive point cloud datasets directly on the desktop.
Autodesk ReCap Photo
Create high-resolution textured 3D models from photos using the power of cloud computing with ReCap Photo, which is available as a Photo-to-3D service in Autodesk 360.
It is Summer for most of us in the Northern hemisphere which is time to for vacations, barbeques, and getting outdoors and doing things like hiking camping fishing etc. We have hit the mid-point of Summer and technically headed for the Fall next so every minute counts. I recognize some readers live in areas where the seasons are only “Hot and Hotter” or “Wet and Dry” instead of the four seasons. I do love having four seasons as each season has such unique things to enjoy, experience, and love.
Are you making the most of your Summer, or doing anything amazing? How are you readers down under spending your Winter time and are you ready for your impending Spring?
My last week’s activities in Utah included climbs totaling over 6000 vertical feet, tubing 16 miles of river, and sliding down natural granite waterfall slides. I don’t want to waste a minute of the warm (actually been very hot) Summer time.
It is that time of the year again and fireworks are used for many events not just the US holiday Fourth of July. If you have a camera and have tried to photograph fireworks then you know how tricky and frustrating this can be. Here are some nice tutorials for capturing photos of fireworks.