photogrammetry VIDEO: Getting Started with Photogrammetry Models Using Your Cell Phone

[NeonsStyle]

This is pretty impressive and looks like a hell of a lot less work than building the model manually. 
 

 

[datiswous]

With Open Source (also Linux) software

[peter_spy]

You still need to have decent modeling skills to create a low poly counterpart and bake textures from high poly. Photogrammetry models are not optimized for games in any way.

[vozka]

You do still need to have modelling skills, but there are some tools that allow automatic retopology to lowpoly available. The state of the art really is surprisingly good and improving every year because there's a lot of demand in commercial games development.

InstaLOD is truly amazing, it's a commercial piece of software, but you can get a free license with some limitations (none are a problem for a project like Dark Mod). I think it's for a year, but I'm not sure. I tried it and it does actually work, the results often do need some tweaking, but really not that much, it saves hours and hours of work. It's so good I thought about making a thread about it here. It even has automatic tools to remove baked shadows which are kinda usable.

The biggest problem I found is that Dark Mod need to be much more lowpoly than most modern games and the polycounts needed are at the bottom edge of what InstaLOD can do, and that the system for baking textures lacked some slightly niche features that I wanted.

I actually think that getting good photogrammetry data without too many anomalies and with workable lighting is a bigger problem nowadays. It looks easy in these youtube videos, but I personally couldn't get good data unless I had a proper mirrorless camera and lucky lighting.