SideFX’s Free AliceVision Photogrammetry Plugin

SideFX has presented a free plugin for Houdini which implements the open-source AliceVision photogrammetry framework inside the popular tool. The plugin, downloadable via SideFX’s Game Development Toolset, allows users to launch image-based modeling jobs within Houdini and have the 3D model appear directly in the Houdini viewport.

The framework creates textured 3D meshes from sets of photographs of real-world objects, exporting the geometry in OBJ format. Then, intermediate point cloud data can be exported in Alembic format, and depth maps as EXR files.

AliceVision runs from the command line, but there are free GUIs available for it: standalone photogrammetry tool Meshroom and Maya plugin MeshroomMaya.

Unlike Reality Capture, AliceVision is free, but you need a new Nvidia GPU to use it as it uses CUDA for GPU processing.

You can learn more and get the plugin here.