123D Catch Review

Overview

123D Catch is a beta program from Autodesk that allows the use to upload images to Autodesk servers where they crunch the data and return a mesh model to the user.
A very nice, free service. Very good results, quite fast, good interface, easy to work with. Recommended, as long as the legalese of the EULA doesn't worry you.

Ease of Use and Workflow:

Ease of use: Excellent
Workflow simplicity: Very Good

How long does it take to get the results?

The fastest of the three. 5-10 minutes, not including time spent changing the mesh resolution.

How good are the results?

Very good, and for a few reasons.
The results, for the most part appear quite accurate. In a few places where the material is reflective or transparent (glass marbles) or the topology complex, there are issues. For the most part, the geometry appears pretty darn good.

This red stone should be spherical.

This marble should be, well, marble shaped.

Where123D Catch shines is in its use of images for texture. Instead of the per-pixel color some photogrammetry programs use, 123D catch gives you what appears to be an auto-generated UV-mapped texture applied to the mesh. That seems like magic to me.

The "UV" texture map. Some of the image is kinda weird - all those random squares. But still amazing that it's done by a computer.

Not surprisingly, 123D Catch doesn't bother giving the user a point cloud. This simplifies things for casual users, but also allows for less control of the output.  You do have an option to create a mesh model that has high, medium or low amounts of polygons (see below).

How does it work?

This is about a simple as photogrammetry gets right now. You download the software (you must sign up for an Autodesk account to do so), install it, and upload.

The image above is what you see when you first start the program. You click on "Create a new Photo Scene".

Once you've selected your images, you click the bright green check mark to "Compute Photo Scene".

But, before it will do that for you, there's a "Quick registration form". No passwords required, just name and email.

It uploads the images, and starts computing. It very nicely gives you a progress bar, and the option to receive an email, if you don't want to wait.

After it thinks about things for a little while, it takes a minute or two to load the mesh model. The view is simple, but the controls are kind of annoying - I always miss using the middle mouse button to orbit around the object (as in Blender).
Notice it gave me more than just the mask. Mostly that's easy to remove.

Another angle. The parts that aren't attached to the mask are easy to delete. It's going to be more difficult to remove the things that are attached to the mask that shouldn't be there.

When you do select parts of the mesh (using those two left-most buttons on the tool bar at top), and then press delete, you get this warning. Mesh resolution is where you can change how many faces (triangles) there are.  To do this, use the blue cube button, second from the right, and it recomputes all the images. you can save the model you have, before that, though.

Here's the mesh with all those extraneous islands deleted.

Export to Blender

Easy.  You can save the file as a .OBJ and import that directly into Blender.

Now we want to export to a format that Blender can use. Don't use the default .dwg. You should use .obj, which is fine. We're only interested in the mesh, anyway, not the texture, though .OBJ brings that, too. It would be nice if 123D catch supported collada, but not really a sticking point.

What are the Terms of Service? (EULA)

I am not a lawyer, and this review is not meant as legal advice.The EULA is, for the most part, a pretty standard close-source document - all that stuff you don't read when you install programs, free or otherwise. You should be reading these things....
The do start section 3. paragraph a), by confirming that you, the creator are the owner of your creations.
In 3. b) i) and ii), the part about sharing you content on their site, well: you're publicly sharing your creation. I think we all can assume you're not all that concerned about keeping control over it. Read this section, before you share your models.
In 3. c) (even though they have a typo that calls it b) again) there is the option for "Keeping your content non-public". You can opt out of sharing, that's good.  However, 3 c) ii) says:

(ii) you automatically grant to us and our sub-licensees [...] a perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, royalty-free, paid-up, worldwide, sublicensable [...] license to have Access to, store, display, reproduce, modify, use, disclose, distribute and transmit such Your Content for purposes of providing, maintaining, repairing, protecting, organizing and/or otherwise administering or providing to you products, services and/or features on the Service [...] to comply with applicable laws/regulations/legal proceedings, in the ordinary course of our (or our designated third parties’) providing, improving and/or modifying the Service or any of products and/or services, including  extracting, compiling, aggregating, synthesizing, using, and otherwise analyzing all or any portion of Your Content and information, and to disclose such Content and information and the results of any such analysis in aggregated form or any other form that does not specifically identify you unless emailed to or Accessed by your authorized designees or otherwise permitted by these Terms.  LINK

I've been over this several times, and I think this is just to show they can do what they need to do with your data to continue to provide the service, but it still makes me a bit nervous.

Let me sum it up: