Lightcraft Technology, a developer of real-time visual effects technology for the film and television industries, announced that it is making its photogrammetry tools available free-of-charge to its clients and to members of the film making community.

Lightcraft has developed a specific set of photogrammetry tools for developing photorealistic sets and digital assets for use in its Previzion system. The same tools can be used with other 3D graphics applications as well.

Lightcraft's Previzion is a real-time visual effects system that provides a combination of high precision camera tracking, sophisticated rendering, and VFX quality keying that makes it ideal for on-set compositing of virtual backgrounds and CGI characters. The Previzion system provides filmmakers with the ability to use dynamic, moving camera shots with a minimal increase in production costs. Lightcraft's photogrammetry pipeline is a set of free tools that are available to all interested parties. Lightcraft has concentrated on developing a robust set of tools (but does not perform the actual photogrammetry work itself) for its clients.

Eliot Mack, Lightcraft's founder and Previzion's architect, Stated: "Lightcraft's photogrammetry tools are a complete set of Maya plug-ins, scripts, and shaders that are designed to import standard photogrammetry data, undistort projected images, assist in the modeling of accurate reference geometry, and then bake the resulting projections into standard texture maps with the appropriate models. This process dramatically speeds up the creation of complete, portable, photorealistic 3D models that can be rendered in real time." Mack continued: "Our photogrammetry tools make it possible for a single person to go out with a DSLR and capture enough stills to create a photorealistic 3D background model."

Photogrammetry Tool Highlights:
• Import scripts to bring in solved camera positions and point clouds from other freely available automatic photo matching tools into Maya
• Undistortion tools to automatically remove distortion from large groups of images based on the camera solves
• Real time CgFx projection shaders that project the undistorted image from a Maya camera onto geometry in real time, enabling very fast and accurate modeling with live texture updates from multiple solved cameras, and fixing modeled objects in 3D space very accurately
• A Maya projection baking plugin that bakes the projected images into UV mapped textures