this post was submitted on 02 Jan 2025
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The easiest option is to take a photo from very far away with a long focal length lens. The longer the better. At least a 200mm focal length. You need a real camera and lens for that, and they aren't free. And you can't always get far away from your subject.
Other people mentioned a flatbed scanner. Excellent choice.
When I've needed to do this for something that didn't fit on a flatbed scanner, I've used photogrammetry. Bonus is that you probably already have everything you need.
Requirements:
Overall process:
This allowed me to measure the position of a whole bunch of really oddly placed screw holes on a 30x30" section of a wall with <1mm accuracy, allowing me to laser cut a thin sheet of plywood having holes in those same locations.
[^1]: Your object will be imported in a random orientaion, and your resultant mesh won't have anything actually flat on it. You can't just pick one poly of the mesh and say "make this poly parallel to my intended plane". It will be rotated in some random way. Especially if the object is something random and bumpy like a brick wall. Even being off by a couple degrees ruins the result. I had to create a cube the size of my object and intersect it with my object, moving and rotating the cube until it visually appeared to be parallel to my object. It was like floating my object in water (the cube) until the surface of the water filled the nooks and crannies of my object more-or-less equally. Then I noted the rotation of that cube and applied the same negative rotation to my object.
I think the software you were thinking of is 3D zephyr.
The best FOSS one imo is Meshroom. One tip when using that is to stop the process after the Structure from Motion process, add a bounding box around the main subject area so that there is less background modeled at the end.
Yes, that was the one. I tried Meshroom as well, at a later date. I forget if it was a success or not.
Good tip, though! I have often had to clean up meshes after the fact using something like Meshmixer. (I am in no way skilled in Blender.)