3D Flow has announced the latest release of 3D Zephyr, its image-based modelling software. Version 4 promises several speed improvements and new features, including:
- Improvements to the entire pipeline including faster processing during the Structure from Motion, Multiview Stereo and Meshing phases.
- Improved accuracy.
- Many small fixes and improvements including better selection tools, better gizmos, a quick project wizard and more.
- A new version of the C++ SDK, FlowEngine, is now available for both Microsoft Windows and GNU/Linux platform (compatible with the VFX platform).
- A tool to pre-download camera calibrations from 3D Flow’s server by simply uploading a JPG and store it offline for later use.
- A preset manager that enables the user to share and download presets directly from Zephyr.
- Quad support for OBJ and FBX formats.
3D Zephyr comes in 3 versions: The fully featured Aerial which costs $3900, Pro which does not have the GIS, CAD & Survey Tools costs $2400, and Lite with a 500 photo limit and GPU restrictions is $149. A free version is also available that has a 50 photo limit. More information on 3Dflow’s website.
Great to see a free version – but a 50 photo limit is, well, rather limiting.
With 50 photos, you cannot tell whether the reconstruction is poor because of lack of coverage or because the algorithm is insufficient.
You can also ask / request “full” – pro / aerial trial version (14 days) 😉
Zephyr’s development team is very friendly and helpful – they really listen their users and keep them up to date from development status.
Well, they have to make a limit somewhere and 50 photos is still useful for hobbyists I think. I always recommend 3d Zephyr to people who are not intending to rent RealityCapture and it’s still a lot faster than Photoscan. So, a good compromise and pretty affordable imho 🙂
Btw there is a full featured demo, so you can try it out with a larger image set and see if it yields good enough results.