Can anyone tell me about this, I have heard of 123Catch however I have never used it, for example. say I wanted to model a certain area, buildings, forests etc, or vehicles, how much can I do this using photos/videos, do apps like 123catch created static meshes or whatever, anyone give me a primer or tutorial?

123dcatch is very easy and quite powerful to build static meshes with full good quality texturing too.

unless you are very good in post-processing the meshes, i would advise against use it for animations, the meshes produced are far from being optimized for that use.

(also pay attention, i don't remember if they own the rights to the files you upload).there are some opensource alternative but those get a bit nasty in the learning curve.

I had to write a 15-pages paper about the topic a few months ago for my boss, should you be interested let me know and i can look if i have it somewhere, might be of some guidance.

cheers

H

So why don't more modellers do this, or maybe they do, I assume you will still have to at least touch up the generated mesh, also how about rigging the mesh will there be any problems there?

As a 3d artist I can tell you that using this kind of model would be really inconvenient.

Most of these kinds of software create point data clouds that convert to vertices, thy are inaccurate and heavily depended on the image input.

In short you would require a large amount of high quality images, to make a model that is only half as good as a professional's model.

The model will also need a lot of cleaning or a complete retopology before use.

It is also cost ineffective, the camera and gear necessary to capture details like bevel edges, would cost more than a artist making the model.

A lot of artist work on laser scanned models, but even these are inaccurate, so thy are mainly used as a base mesh.