Save Time on Your 3D Models with 123D Catch

You’ve already got enough on your plate worrying about art renders, deadlines, color palettes, the uncanny valley, and whether or not you accidentally just deleted an art project that you spent three days working on. It’s my job to take some weight off your shoulders by showing you ways to make your life as a 3D artist just a little bit easier.

So, I would like to point you out to 123D Catch, a program that may very well fundamentally change how you create 3D models. As part of the Photofly project, his free piece of software was created by the folks behind AutoCad, so right off the bat that should tell you a lot about the quality of the program. Users can snap a photo, upload the picture into the software, and then watch as the program transforms the two-dimensional image into a three-dimensional model.

The program has been out for a while now, but sometimes it can slip under the radar of 3D artists. Modelers tend to focus so much on art techniques and design programs that they can overlook handy programs that do a lot of the hard work for you.

The coolest thing about it is that you don’t have to buy some special camera to get it to work. Just snap a few photos of your buddy with your camera phone, email the pic to yourself, upload the image, and voila! You’ll have a rough 3D model of your friend. The only catch is that you have to maintain an Internet connection. All of the digital heavy lifting is done on cloud servers, presumably because they want to keep secret their 2D-3D conversion technique.

Without doubt, 123D Catch could be a major shortcut for 3D users. Normally, creating a complete 3D model of an object could take hours of hard work as you take painstakingly precise measurements and tweak your digital model. This software could theoretically cut down that process to mere minutes. The best artists use references, so why bother trying to mimic a reference when you can literally transfer the reference’s dimensions into your computer?

 

This is especially useful for the artists who are really into making clay sculptures or wax carvings. A lot of artists like being able to work with their hands in 3D space rather than working through a 2D computer monitor. 123D Catch could allow you to seamlessly transfer your clay sculptures into 3D digital space.

Obviously, this type of software won’t come close to replacing 3D modelers. Design groups will still need trained professionals who can modify models to meet the needs of any project. This software will simply speed things along by giving 3D artists a cheap, fast way to create true-to-life 3D models.

Go check it out! Stop wasting long hours building basic 3D models from scratch when you can build complete 3D models in a fraction of the time!