I have had one response to the issue of deriving “point clouds” from digital photography. In this case Kean Walmsley reports in his blog that he has been working with Microsoft’s Photosynth service in order to avoid the need for a scanner. He has also figured out how to import the derived point cloud into AutoCAD 2011.
Kean is a Senior Manager for Developer Technical Services at Autodesk, so if your budget does not support a scanner, this may be of interest. I guess you could call it a poor man’s version of scanning.
Photosynth Sphinx in AutoCAD 2011
Now that’s crowd sourcing.
How accurate are those point-clouds? Can’t be as accurate (based off a photo and software manipulation) than an actual scanner could provide.
This is intensive resource sucking application. As CAD advances it needs more power to run. To make more efficient we need support for LINUX OS. It is possible and extremely efficient to have separate OS for CAD in LINUX. We know, these days newer windows means 1/4 efficient as it was before. This is true for vista and windows 7. By the time newer windows version, the power of PC increased by twice and newer windows needs 4 times more power.