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Eos’ PhotoModeler 6 simply awesome

Oftentimes, creating the 3D model is the hardest part about completing a project (at least for me, anyways). It is painstaking and time consuming work to take some real or imagined object or character and translate it into something your 3D modeling app can understand.

What’s most frustrating is that you often have some stock photography or a sketch to work with while you are building your model. One would think that by now a computer could do a lot of the rote work you are doing: matching lines and edges on your photograph to the lines that you want on your model. Many-a-time I have wished for a program that would do exactly that.

Little did I know that one existed since 1993.

PhotoModeler, from Eos, has just been released in its sixth edition (which was three years in the making!). I don’t know why or how I haven’t come across this tool yet, but somehow it evaded me until very recently. PhotoModeler does basically exactly what I wanted a program to do: you give it digital images of multiple angles of an object (say, a car), and with your help, it turns that into a model.

In some ways, going through the process of making the model using PhotoModeler is just as painstaking as just using stock photography in the 3D modeling app you already use. You still have to hold the program’s hand for a lot of the way, matching which edges on one photograph relate to the other on another photograph, for example. The program is not good enough yet that it can just look at a bunch of photographs, figure it out, and pop out a perfect 3D model (and no program can probably get there until AI gets much, much better).

But it does make the process a lot snappier. Because the tool is built specifically for image input, it is has a lot of built in functionality that helps you turn your digital photos into 3D models, and tries its darnedest to figure out fro you exactly which edges match what.

Version 6 also has some new features that make it quite a bit easier to use. For one, there is now better export for Maya, which includes exporting camera data you create in PhotoModeler. On the subject of camera movements, it is now also possible for you to use PhotoModeler with video recording data, and use it to make “idealized” camera movements, which makes export to 3D animation programs possible.

Overall, PhotoModeler was a pleasure to use, and I would highly recommend it to anyone annoyed with the process of converting digital imagery into 3D models.

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