hey folks,
does anyone know a piece of software that converts a black/white photo of a face into a 3D CAD file. I am not talking about getting a full 360° head model. Just the face with hairline, beginning of the ears, chin. It probably needs to be finished later on but should be as close as possible.
Anyone an idea or recommendation?
Impossible with just one image. A 3D artist might be able to do it, but it is a very difficult task even for a human.
You could use a 3D program such as 3DMAX, Lightwave, etc.
Use the B&W image as a contour map, whites for peaks, black for troughs and have it create a mesh from it. Though it have been A Long (years) since I’ve played with such programs but have done that sort of thing.
You’ll only have an 3D embossed flat, but it could be place onto an object from there.
Then export to file type of choice.
programs like linuxcnc will automatically convert a grayscale picture to height data and mill it, via image-to-gcode: http://www.linuxcnc.org/docs/2.4/html/gui_image-to-gcode.html but as stated before you need a grayscale picture that accurately represents height, which is non-trivial to take.
I didn’t get to play with it much but check out MeshCam. It seems to me like they had something in their software that played with bitmaps:)
Thnx for your replies. I will look into your recommendations. What would help would be to mark parts of the face as e.g. nose, chin etc. and the software would calculate that e.g. a shadow behind the nose doesn’t mean that there is a hole behind.
A challenge for programmers out there. 
Software called artcam
Obviously 123D catch if you have more than one picture?