Do you remember Autodesk Lab's Project PhotoFly? Well, it has recently graduated into 123D Catch. And it's still free!
The idea behind it is that you can use a digital camera to take pictures of something, load it into this software, and it uses all sorts of black magic and cloud computing to convert these pictures into a real honest to goodness 3D mesh with texture. I used the Labs version to take pictures of a small statue on a co-worker's desk using just the camera on my cell phone and the results were astonishing. You can then take a known dimension on the object to convert it into something that has real size and scale.
But just how accurate is the resulting model? A model generated from nothing more than digital photos.
Well, to help answer that question I thought I'd pass along an article that I recently ran across:
http://www-staff.lboro.ac.uk/~cvjhc/OtherFiles/Accuracy%20of%20123DCatch.htm
It's a pretty interesting (technical) read. If you've never seen 123D Catch or PhotoFly before, here is a video overview:
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