A few months back, Shawn Wasserman previewed Autodesk’s Reality Capture software, Memento. At the time, Memento wasn’t yet ready for public consumption, so it was hard to know exactly how well the software would work. Well, all of that’s changed, and since Memento’s been out in the wild for a bit, I figured it was time to give it a test drive. Here’s what I found out.
Memento Is Actually Easy to Use
Since I didn’t have any photos available, I grabbed a totem that I got on my last trip out to San Francisco (coincidentally, I was covering REAL2015 at the time), stuck it in my microwave (because it has a turn table) and snapped 32 shots of my object.
Within a few seconds of uploading Memento, I had all of my photos captured and placed into a linear sequence. With only a few options at my disposal, I named my project, clicked upload and decided to let Memento do its dirty work with only a few alterations (read: I deleted a few blurry images).
After being whisked away to Autodesk’s complimentary cloud processing servers, a notification email hit my desktop within 10 minutes, letting me know my photos had been stitched into a model (a .rcm file) that was ready for me to download.
The Rendered Results
When the model first resolved inside the software, I was immediately impressed. Aside from having rendered an accurate 3D model from still images, Memento’s backend was able to stitch my photos together with accuracy, leading to a near virtual clone of my real world object.
While there were a few major discrepancies — most notably the mirrored, psychedelic head distortion and a wavy section that distorted the base — Memento proved it had the chops to be an entry-level reality capture program.
In an effort to explore the software a bit more, I decide that I’d try and fix some of the broken bits of my model. This was where Memento showed its consumer-grade flaws.
While the tools and environment were robust enough to work with my mesh without crashing, they were difficult to use in any meaningful way. Granted, I only tooled around with the software for about 20 minutes, but the results I got were less than spectacular. That being said, I was able to close up the gaps that exposed the top and bottom of my model. I was also able to remove enough of the distortion in the upper part of my model to render something that could be considered a loose facsimile of Buddha’s top-knot.
So, there’s that.
The Takeaway
For anyone interested in reverse engineering, or just creating a model of an unobtainable artifact, Memento is an excellent tool. It works reliably, and its editing features make stitching a model very easy. Depending on one’s idea of perfection, acceptable, if not incredible, results can be obtained quickly.
That being said, I’m not sure that Memento has much value as an engineering tool. It is, however, a tool that engineers and anyone with an inquisitive mind (and a good 3D printer) would find cool. Being able to capture data from the real and turn it into a memento (sorry) is always satisfying.
Then again, given Memento’s reliance on a distant cloud-based rendering tool, it could just be another input program used to build better object recognition for advanced AI. Nefarious or not, that could be troubling…
Who am I kidding? Memento is just a fun toy. Try it. It’s worth it.