2D to 3D with Photofly. 360° Building model.

Making full 3D model of a real building, not just one facade, was quite a challenge. I chose my object to be quite large, but not too complicated in form, but with some really nice details on exterior, so I took photos of "Church of St. Gertrude". It is located in the Old Town of Kaunas and is one of the oldest Brick Gothic churches in Lithuania.


I took pictures, according to the video tutorials in the official Photofly site.
Here is some sample pictures:

I've got ~235 photos, that is including closeups.
At first I tried to upload all of them, but I couldn't do it. There was an error message: "unable to upload photos, check your internet connection" or something like that. My guess is that  this happens due to limitations set on photofly servers. My other guess is that images are not in a logical sequence.
So I tried couple of things:
1. Reducing image quality - same error.
2. Reducing image size - same error.
3. Radically reducing amount of pictures (and without closeup pictures) - successful.

After lots of attempts to upload different pictures, I've managed to upload 45 reduced quality photos, which were about 21mb in size, but the result was terrible. It only compilated one half of a model.

This is what I've got:

I made a conclusion, that the best way to make full 3D high detail model is to upload pictures of separate parts: south facade, than west facade and so on. I've uploaded closeup scenes like entrance portal separately as well.
When uploading separate parts, You can use higher quality images, so You'll get a better quality model. Here is some snapshots:

26 high quality pictures, 130mb -

43 high quality pictures, 211mb -

...and so on.

I still had some problems, for example: than taking pictures from backside of a church, nearby building was too close, so I had to take 3-4 photos from top to bottom in every horizontal step to cover a whole building, and due to different perspective, there was mistakes like this: made a hole instead of window, even the window was covered in at least 6 photos:

I couldn't manage to make a whole 3D model in one scene, but when making separate scenes I've got really good overall result.


Next step is to export every part (mesh) to .obj or other file format, and use the external software to combine them all into one model. This can't be done inside Autodesk Photo Scene Editor, so I will cover this topic in my next posts. Make sure to follow.