3DF Zephyr Lite Steam Edition Reviews

If you aren't making money with Photogrametry, but you are interested in turning photos / videos in to 3D models, then 3DF Zephyr should probably where you start. There are open source tools available if that is important to you, but setup time and quality of the results vary widely. The free (limit of 50 photos per model) and lite (available here on Steam for a reasonable price) versions of 3DF Zephyr compete with more expensive (outright purchase cost or monthly subscription) products in the market. The free edition on their website lets you use 50 photos, you can get a good feel for the software with it. This lite version on steam increases the limit to 500 which allows for some excellent results with high details. These versions have limitations, but Pro and Aerial features trickle down as they see fit. I'd love to see control points at the lite level, if my photoset isn't working out of the box, I'm kind of SOL with it. Overall you have little or nothing to lose by trying this product out.

Nice enough software but it would be really beneficial to be able to set up control points. Would pay extra for this but then again the full version is a bit on the steap price side again for a hobbyist.(Kinda hobbit). Us guys that use this cheap version is probably the guys who needs this most since we most often neither have the greater skills nor the photo equipment to take perfect shots from start. Hopes the softvare will evolve to contain more controllable features regarding lining up photos. The coloring option for manual control points is already in the option menu even though the feature is gone from steam version.

Absolutely wonderful product. If you're careful about your focal distance not changing and take plenty of pictures, you'll get great results!

Fantastic software with great customer service. It's a program that easy to use but hard to master; with lots of options and possibilities.

Great for grabbing pretty good models from drone flights for cheap. I hate pay to play programs that force you to shell out every project. No thanks! My RTX 2080 rails this! It says it supports 1 gpu but I was able to get 3x 1080GTX's running at once on it.

I have almost 500 hours in this software. I also have used the Matter and Form V2 for a month. What I have discovered the difference between 3DF photogrammetry and M&F lasers. 3DF comes out with a model (assuming you spend hours doing proper masking) that is almost immediately usable in Unity (run it through PolyGone for a quick and dirty optimization solution). M&F woah boy. Very high resolution, but the holes, the holes! The tutorial videos are wrong. I had to meet with their engineering team via skype to be walked through PROPER execution. Even so, it seems to work primarily works with certain textures and not others. while it does let you capture multiple scans and attempt to merge the cloud points automatically, it is very hit or miss. You get one scan to capture texture, so if you do 2 texture scans from different angles it will be unusable and blur. So the holes will not fill with textured polygons. Using 3DF I can capture and action figure I sculpted. It's resolution is usable in a game engine, but it's mesh isn't detailed enough (for me) to use it in 3D printing. Using M&F the resolution is there (when it works) to print, but again when it doesn't work, it's just a pain in the ass. I've spent 13 hours scanning and rescanning objects trying to get something usable, while 3DF gets me something "usable" in about 5 hours (including masking time). So $200 for 3DF is worth it if your end goal is to put your object into a video game. If you're trying to 3D print you're going to have some clean up. It's an easy buy compared to the $750 M&F V2, which is very difficult to get working. Do not buy their ads, or tutorial videos, it does not work like they show. It is far from calibrate, place object, hit scan.

This software is amazing. The power that it has is incredible. I am barely scratching the surface but am very impressed. Perhaps more amazing than the software itself is the support. By simply asking a question about why my images weren't working, the developer has taken my images and looked at them and helped me create something awesome....three times, with 3 subjects. I recommend this for sure. I'm looking forward to trying my first human model soon.

For anyone looking at getting this, they just removed the 500 photo limit for the lite edition. That's awesome

I had this program on my whishlist for quite some time and i couldn't resist when it came at a reduced price during the summer sale. I tested many solutions to produce 3d models out of photographs and 3DF Zephyr is the winner. It is fast, accurate, forgiving in regard to image quality and integrates very well with all my other 3d tools, be it Blender, Lightwave or 3d-Coat. The lite version availlable on Steam provides everything you need to get your objects into 3d, whereas the aerial and pro versions offer advanced functionality used in science, medicine or geography. One feature that i like in particular is the ability to extract frames out of video files. Though the lite version is limited to 200 images it is more than enough to achieve good results. You load a video file, set the frames per second to extract and 3DF Zephir picks the best images on its own. This also allows the reconstruction of aerial footage filmed with drones, for example. Tools for image quality analysis prior to reconstruction are provided. This saves you a lot of time. Masking is also provided. It allows you to tell 3DF Zephyr what parts of an image to consider during reconstrucion and what part of the image to ignore, i.e. the background. If you create a sequence of mask images in another application (black and white, like an alpha channel) and name those with a "_mask" or "_masked" suffix, 3DF Zephir automatically loads these images as masks. To me, 3DF Zephir provides everything i need to get my objects into 3d space. It's easy to use, versatile and provides high quality results. Here's an interactive version of a little statue i reconstructed: http://www.threedeemedia.ch/marmoset/gwynbleidd02.html And here's a video showing the workflow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5fNT7y2B4c

I have a decent windows 8 system, Core i7, 16GB ram, GTX780 Zeypher crashes while doing their first tutorial with their sample dataset. Blue Screen of Death. This happens during the Dense Point Cloud generation. [Edit] Developer has been very helpful in tracking down the issue, suggesting that I may have a CPU or other component unable to handle the computational load. After running a PC stress test, it appears to have uncovered an issue with my system... After attempting to get a model generated many times, I finally did... so the software seems to work, but my DigitalStorm PC is clearly not happy under some specific load conditions! Sad for me... but good for Zephyr and the developers... Thanks for the assist fellas.