Product Reviews

iModeller 3D Pro is an intriguing product, as the packaging announces '3D scanning with your digital camera'. This has to be worth investigating, as 3D scanners cost tens of thousands of pounds but you can pick up a digital camera for a few hundred.

The idea behind iModeller Pro is deceptively simple: the model to be scanned is photographed in relation to a reference pattern of circles. The software then uses the relationship between the position of the model and the circles to calculate information such as object volume, zoom length and camera focal length. This reference pattern is printed from directly within the program (working with a fresh, uncreased copy is recommended for best results), and can be printed out at any size to cater for different sized subjects.

The input phase from the end-user consists of three stages: Capture, Calibration and Masking. Capture is taking your digital photos. It's here your expertise with lighting and shooting will pay off, as results can only be as good as the original images. Try to shoot your object against a high-contrast background and set up the lighting to give even diffusion, avoiding shadows. As the object has to be photographed from a 360 viewpoint, some sort of turntable is useful.

The next stage is Calibration. You load your images into iModeller Pro (you'll need at least 10 for meaningful results) and they appear as a series of thumbnails in a pane on the left of the user interface. You can perform basic colour, brightness and contrast correction at this stage (although you're better off doing this in Photoshop, where the process can be automated via Actions). Next, by simply clicking on the Calibrate tab, iModeller Pro automatically calibrates the images by picking out the reference pattern - a green bar underneath each thumbnail indicates the percentage of accuracy of the process. Manual calibration is also available, but the automatic process should be fine as long as you have enough of the reference

ADVERTISEMENT

pattern circles showing. One new feature is Marker calibration, which allows you to 'point up' areas of the model to which you want iModeller Pro to pay specific attention. The further away a part of the object is from the reference pattern, the harder it is to capture fine detail. Markers allow you to get around this. However, these will have to be set in every image.

Masking is the most 'manual' part of the process: the object must now be masked to isolate it from its background. Photoshop users will be familiar with this process, as it works a lot like Quick Mask mode. Brush and Bucket tools are there to help build the mask and fill tolerance, and brush sizes can be set as in Photoshop - almost: the '[' and ']' keys for decreasing and increasing the brush size work the other way around to Photoshop, which can be quite annoying.

This basic masking marks out the volume of the object, but there are two special types of mask. Detail mask allows you to flag areas on the model that need more triangles to preserve mesh detail, while texture masking allows areas of high texture fidelity (such as writing) to be flagged. Conversely, it allows you to exclude areas that don't need to be texture mapped.

Once the images are masked satisfactorily, it's simply a question of hitting the 3D tab, and iModeller Pro builds your mesh for you. It goes one stage further by automatically UV mapping the image information onto your mesh as a texture. If you've ever tried to manually UV map organic objects from scratch, you'll appreciate what a feat this is. The result is a pretty convincing rendition of your object, too. The meshes themselves may not be perfect, but the applied UV texture maps more than make up for any deficiencies in that respect.

Sure, the results aren't like those available from top-flight 3D packages, but that's not the point: iModeller Pro is more about rapid prototyping (and it is rapid compared with traditional methods) and producing low-polygon stand-ins either for games or animatics development. One company is even using it to capture personal mementos that clients then have laser-etched into blocks of crystal. The meshes generated by this version seem much cleaner than in previous versions, and our only complaint is the numerous interface glitches (no filenames in the workspace window, and misaligned buttons and pop-up menus) that mar an otherwise very slick product. Still, with its new pricing of €599 (was £599) iModeller Pro 2.5 is a welcome addition to the 3D arsenal, and should save a lot of people a lot of time.