The ESA asked people to use their imagery of the Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. They released an archive of photos under the CC BY-SA. I took them, threw them into a trial version of Agisoft Photoscan and generated a textured mesh in it. I then exported it as .obj-model, loaded it in Blender and exported it to a WebGL scene with blend4web. In other words, I just threw some programs at it.
You can see the result in your browser at http://hannes.enjoys.it/geo/67p.html (~7 Megabytes). Be aware that while I used a lower quality version for this web version, the higher quality versions I tried were not actually that much “better”. The quality is limited by the resolution of the imagery and of course the fact that we do not have full coverage of a well-lit comet. Still totally fascinating and lots of fun to try.
You can download a higher quality .obj at http://hannes.enjoys.it/geo/67p.7z (~12 Megabytes), you can import that straight into Blender.
Now could someone turn the VisualSFM suite into something that is fun to use on Linux so I can try without Photoscan? ;)
PS: I should add that I have not used Photoscan without ground control points for a completely foreign object before. Someone with more experience should be able to get a better result out of it. If you do and you read this, please share your wisdom!
Nice job. Indeed very fun to be able to rotate Tchury on my screen.
Should be Blend4Web, not Blend2Web :D
I observe culling back faces, for which reason the model does not look solid. Is it desired behavior? If not, you might consider to recalculate normals in Blender.
Well, I understand that you only have a surface, not a solid object. Perhaps disabling backface culling in Blender settings will help this model to look better.
Oops, I updated the name. :)
The images are very incomplete, the backside is in darkness so I could only get a partial surface out of it. I should have called it that but thought “partial model” might be easier to understand for random people. I’ll try the culling toggle.
Thanks for stepping by!