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123D Catch is a free program by Autodesk that I recently found out about that lets you turn photos into 3D models. In short: You take photos from all angles of something. Then you load them into 123D Catch and it'll upload them, make them into a 3D model, and then it'll automatically download it.

I stumbled upon this video randomly, and to my surprise, he noted something about being able to take the model from 123D Catch and import it into a game. It turns out, you can export it as a wide variety of file types for various programs, such as Maya, 3DS Max, and Softimage. This means you can get a great model (if you take good photos) easily. You'll probably have to reduce the poly count though.

If you decide to try this out, you'll need to make an account on the official website. Then when you open it up, you'll see that there are some links to starter videos which help a lot.

This may or may not be of interest to you, but please note your thoughts about it. I'm no modeler, but I thought this might be of interest to someone.

Wow! This may be promising, I'm not modeler either, but I'll look into it. Great find!

I'm not so sure about this, this looks like it would work well for movies, but it would be a bit to impractical for games. It looks like you are going to have to do a lot of poly reduction to get a model even close to SWBF2 worthy. Plus you need to have the actual object in the real world to use the program.

That said, I'm still going to try this because I want to see what it can do and the idea behind it is amazing. Legos anyone?

Oh my goodness, this looks so innovative, revolutionary, and just plain AWESOME!!!

This application was actually in a list of cool free software that I have been compiling which I intend to post, 123D Catch used to be called Photofly. There are quite a few programs out there capable of creating models from images.

I heard about a software (forgot the name ) where you can use a normal Webcam to create a 3D model, I think it was an open source project which wasn't quite finished though. But this sounds cool, too !

Marth8880 wrote: Oh my goodness, this looks so innovative, revolutionary, and just plain AWESOME!!!

I once had this idea where you could walk around an object from all angles while taking a video and then it would morph them together to create a 3D scene that you could use for whatever. I'm excited about this because I've never been a modeler and if I want 3D rocks, I need 3D rocks.

Looks neat but like what was already said you'd spend so much time reducing detail so that it would work good in game that you could have just learned low poly modeling. Also, to reduce the model properly and not ruin it you'd need knowledge of modeling so I don't think this program would help anyone who was struggling with learning to model.

I'm sure it'd also take some time to get a good result from all the photos.