Blender for Reverse engineering, 3D scanning, photogrammetry, etc
I recently posted something about this as a feature request but I am hoping to start a bit more of a discussion about it here. I am wondering if it would be possible to inspire devs to move in this direction and what it might take to make it happen.
Historically most scanning and reverse engineering has been done by companies that use expensive software but as scanners get cheaper and more people are doing photogrammetry which includes high poly meshes with textures I think the want for free to cheap software for cleanup and reverse engineering will be blowing up and I think Blender would be the perfect tool for a lot of this with some mostly small improvements.
One thing I would love to see is a workspace specifically for this kind of work similar to what 3D coat offers. So when you open Blender you could start with a 3D scanning/reverse engineering workspace optimized for cleanup and related work.
Then things like being able to handle high poly meshes would be huge. I am trying to work with a 500k mesh right now and it's so laggy I can barely do anything while I am just trying to simplify the mesh. In 3D scanning meshes go easily into the millions of polys.
Some small improvements could make Blender a really amazing tool for this kind of work.
Is there anything I could do to inspire work on this? Could I start interest threads in some related groups and see if there is interest? Would it be possible to do a crowdfunding campaign with some specific goals as a bounty program or something like that?
1 Comment
This doesn't really sound like a feature proposal as is, so I'm not sure it's meaningful to have this discussion here.
Performances as a whole are always being worked on, this isn't something specific to that area of the industry or any other.
A workspace is quite a good idea if you want to get the ball going. You can start making one yourself, and get the community involved to enhance it. And maybe then you can try to propose it to the BF as a feature request if you get anything functional and that meets their guidelines. If I were you, I'd start by that, with a topic on blenderartists.org to gather anyone interested in the community.
Good to note that, while you can enable specific addons in a workspace, the BF have some strict guidelines for shipping addons . So not every addon can apply by design or per its developer's disposition.
Though that's harder to do for simple practical reasons, there's nothing preventing you from making your own Blender branch or even run a crowdfunding for that, the source code if open, and you can do whatever you want as long as you keep the same license basically. 'doesn't mean the BF will merge it to the main release.