So I've gotten back into prop making after getting a 3D Printer. As such, I wanted to open a general question about obtaining measurements for prop designing. I apologize if there is discussion elsewhere on this topic, I couldn't find any.
I know the general process is to obtain a plethora of reference photos, blow them up, and just meticulously measure relative dimensions against known dimensions and estimates.
I was curious any tricks or best practices people in the community have come up with.
I was also curious about tools or software that could be utilized to improve the process.
One piece of software I'm researching is Fiji/ImageJ (https://fiji.sc/) (https://imagej.net/Welcome). It's a open-source suite of tools for analyzing images in Science (Fiji is a preconfigured distro of ImageJ). Most of the functionality isn't applicable, but it does have measurement capability where you can draw a line and assign that to a known scale, then draw other lines and polygons over the image and get the relative dimensions. The interface leaves a lot to be desired, and I'm struggling to do basic things like get the lengths of all the sides of a polygon, labeling and editing lines later, saving and restoring a work session, and relating dimensions against multiple images.
An ideal software I think would be able to load multiple images in a work session, draw and label lines and polygons, link scale lines between images (say I can determine scale of a detail at one angle against a known dimension, and then scale another angle view against the detail I calculated), and maybe do some basic perspective correction. All of this could then give me a dimension list for modeling in Fusion360.
I'm not sure if this can be accomplished with other existing software such as Fusion 360 or FreeCAD.
So thoughts?
I know the general process is to obtain a plethora of reference photos, blow them up, and just meticulously measure relative dimensions against known dimensions and estimates.
I was curious any tricks or best practices people in the community have come up with.
I was also curious about tools or software that could be utilized to improve the process.
One piece of software I'm researching is Fiji/ImageJ (https://fiji.sc/) (https://imagej.net/Welcome). It's a open-source suite of tools for analyzing images in Science (Fiji is a preconfigured distro of ImageJ). Most of the functionality isn't applicable, but it does have measurement capability where you can draw a line and assign that to a known scale, then draw other lines and polygons over the image and get the relative dimensions. The interface leaves a lot to be desired, and I'm struggling to do basic things like get the lengths of all the sides of a polygon, labeling and editing lines later, saving and restoring a work session, and relating dimensions against multiple images.
An ideal software I think would be able to load multiple images in a work session, draw and label lines and polygons, link scale lines between images (say I can determine scale of a detail at one angle against a known dimension, and then scale another angle view against the detail I calculated), and maybe do some basic perspective correction. All of this could then give me a dimension list for modeling in Fusion360.
I'm not sure if this can be accomplished with other existing software such as Fusion 360 or FreeCAD.
So thoughts?
