Producing scale drawings

Arthur,

Perhaps no immediate help but what you are describing is the same technology currently being used for "Avartars".. Sort of talking heads, animated recreations of real people and stuff.

For that type of 3D imagery there are programs such as Poser and Bryce amongst others...

May not be what your looking for but if you find the crowd that use these types of programs they are sure to have a good understanding of what you are after?

Pete

I wonder if this page is of any help inyou search:

Also as Ive just found out the term used is 'photogrammetry' for extracting measurements from photographs.

This page whilst commercial has a tour:

Pete

"Photomodeler Light" was disontinued some years back so that's not an option any longer unless you know someone who still has a copy. It was rather limited, in that the results depended on how many dimesions were known and input into the setup

You can reverse engineer rough working drawings using an reverse 3 point measured perspective technique. Unfortunately the technique does require a competent CAD program unless you have a very large drawing board

Aidrian

Hi Arthur,

Have a look at this page:

The Gimp is a free image editing package which is often included on computer magazine cover disks.

regards,

Martin.

---------- email: snipped-for-privacy@templot.com web:

Now that's clever!

Guy

you have to dig to find prices... always suspicious of stuff where they try to hide the reddies :o)

No cheese, Gromit?

Someone mention cheese?

Aidrian Bridgeman-Sutton offered me a plate of cheese and whispered:

I could not recommend Photomodeler in any shape or form. I attempted to use it to produce 3D meshes for a modelling package. Cleaning up the mesh afterwards took as long as building from scratch would have done.

Try this one.........

Regards

I think you mean The Gimp is THEE free image editing program, nothing to touch it.

Ken.

Um, well, much as I like The Gimp for photo editing, it isn't exactly a drafting package, now is it? I think an MCAD package would be closer to what the original poster had in mind. I've been searching for a nice GPL'd drafting package, too. Haven't found what I am looking for, but by golly Blender (blender3d.org) looks pretty interesting for creating 3d images... but also looks like a steep learning curve. And _also_ not a drafting pacakge.

-dave

True. I was suggesting there isn't a better free IE prog.

From what I've read Blender is fantastic but far too complicated for my simple mind until its tidied up and gets some serious documenting. But Linux Format's had some useful offerings.

Having had to learn to read drawings in the past I can't see the point of

3D for anything as simple as railway modelling. Some of its use in Model Engineer seems to be like a bikini - covering things better left obvious. If you already have the photographs, 2D drawings are all you really need.

The problem with the OP's request is that such a program needs information about lenses, height of camera, and so on, which it can only get by assuming straight edges really are straight. Fine for buildings and wagons, not so clever when it comes to locos and coaches. But then, what do I know? :)

Ken.

Thanks for all the suggestions. I have Gimp installed, but I'd never got round to RTFM, so I had realised it might do it! As I'm doing a box on wheels in 00, straight edges are probably a reasonable-ish assumption, and I can probably ignore lens distortion, etc - this won't be a P4 superdetailed model...

My attempts at hand drawings have failed to produce anything which get all the grilles and doors placed to look "right", so I'll see what the computer can do.