Design Nomenclature / Digital Model Making
Photogrammetry
Also called photo scanning, structure from motion, SfM
This entry has not been translated yet and is shown in English.
Reconstructing geometry from overlapping photographs by matching features across views, solving for camera positions, and triangulating a dense point cloud. It needs texture to match on: matte, detailed, evenly lit surfaces resolve, while gloss, glass, and flat white do not. Scale comes only from a reference placed in the scene.
In practice
Often used for the whole pipeline through to a retopologized, baked asset. The capture is the easy half, and the lighting you shot in is in the texture forever.
Not to be confused with
- 3D ScanningMeasuring a real surface directly: structured light projects a known pattern, laser triangulation sweeps a line, time-of-flight times a return. All produce range data in the instrument's own frame, and multiple passes must be registered together. Accuracy here is a specification — unlike photogrammetry's, which is an outcome.
- Point CloudAn unstructured set of measured 3D points, often with colour and estimated normals, and with no connectivity: no edges, no faces, no surface. It is data, not a model. Everything downstream — meshing, normal estimation, hole filling — is inference, and noise, occlusion, and registration error are already in it.
Origin
Photo, gramma, metron — measuring from drawings made by light. It began as a nineteenth-century aerial-survey discipline, which is why the maths is camera-solving rather than modeling.