Current scientific evidence indicates the dinosaurs as we know them are all gone, but they left fossilized bones, tracks, and other traces behind telling the story.

Last week I was working on a project in Northern Arizona and found an exhibit of a sandstone that had actual dinosaur footprints on it on display outside the Glen Canyon Dam visitors center. In Utah and Arizona it is not unusual to find dinosaur footprints in rocks and sadly a recent amazing example located near Moab Utah was vandalized and lost forever. So how can we preserve these fossil records without purchasing expensive 3D scanning equipment? In this case I used my smartphone a iPhone 6 and its camera to capture a series of photos and then using the currently free Autodesk Project Memento and generated an accurate textured 3D model of the dinosaur’s fossilized footprint.

So here you see the series of 40 photos I took of the sandstone fossilized dinosaur footprints.

So go install Autodesk Project Memento which is currently pre-release and free after a quick registration. 

Select to create a photo scene and upload and wait for it to alert you your model is done.

Here is the resulting highly detailed and accurate 3D textured mesh of the dinosaur footprint and available for export to OBJ, STL, and many other formats and uses.

Now there is a digital record of this footprint to preserve it, 3D print it, study it, or display it online or use as a digital prop in a 3D game or animation. All it takes is a camera and you can generate highly detailed and accurate textured meshes of almost anything and in higher detail that the 123D Catch app.

In Project Memento you have many tools to study the mesh, retopo the mesh, and so much more. You can also export and modify the mesh in Autodesk Meshmixer.

What can you capture in 3D?

Cheers,
Shaan