Here is a quick test I did using Autodesk Photo Fly and my car.

I took about 18 images of the car as I walked around from a roughly consistent distance. I then uploaded the images to the Photo Fly cloud computing service. When it was done computing it e-mailed my a link to download the finished “Photo Scene” which I then opened up in Autodesk Photo Scene Editor as you see in the video. I then export a .FBX file and loaded it into Max 2011. At this point I didn’t do any actual image modeling but this demonstrates the core functionality.

Pretty interesting results I think! I imagine angular objects like buildings will prove much easier to deal with. You also can download a rzi file which is the native file format for Autodesk Image Modeler. It seems like Photo Fly provides a pretty reliable point solve which certainly makes life in Image Modeler much easier. Granted since you can import cameras and helpers into Max you could bypass Image Modeler all together if you are using this just for camera mapping or reference geometry and do your modeling within Max.

Here is an earlier post about this and some other projects at Autodesk Labs.