Examples
Warning: these 3D models are large files (hundreds of megabytes) and may take several minutes to download.
These are a few examples of photogrammetry, reconstructing a 3D scene from a few 2D photographs using an everyday camera and some free software.
Photogrammetry is the science of making measurements from photographs. It infers the geometry of a scene from a set of unordered photographs or videos. Photography is the projection of a 3D scene onto a 2D plane, losing depth information. The goal of photogrammetry is to reverse this process.
To make these models, I just took around 50 photographs of each subject with an ordinary digital camera, walking around to view them from all sides. Then I put the results into Meshroom, which uses my graphics card and lots of memory to perform its photogrammetry magic, and then edited the results in Blender to turn them the right way up and generally clean up around the edges. The resulting GLTF file can be viewed in any HTML5 browser, thanks to the Babylon.js 3D viewer.
Rotunda
Sundial
Engine