Autodesk 123D Catch Beta

I was very excited to hear about Autodesk's 123D Catch. 123D Catch lets you take ordinary photos and turn them into 3D models. Here is a quick introduction.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=6aU2s85Zw3A

So I downloaded the software from here. The software comes with some good tutorials and the program is pretty straight forward to use. For the object I wanted to create I took 42 photos spinning around the object. I uploaded them and waited for Autodesk to email to let me know it was completed. A couple of the images were too dark so the object I received was not 100% but 42 images is probably the minimum I would suggest.

It looked pretty good if I do say so myself. Next, what I was most excited about was getting it into 3ds Max. This was simple, File, Export, FBX and import into Max, this is what I got below.

The scene contains cameras where all the shots were taken from, which could come in handy. I then opened up the Material Editor and selected the material from the object. There were two in this case. The file Autodesk emailed me contained to texture sheets which I remapped to the correct location and below are the 2 texture sheets and the result i got.

I then added a Mental Ray Daylight system and applied a smoothing group to the whole object and rendered. Below are the results. The mesh was very heavy and if I had more time I could have cleaned it up a lot and patched up any broken areas in the model.

Catch 123D is an amazingly powerful tool which I am sure will come in handy in future. Definitely give this free software a try and let me know how you get on.