Canoma Tutorial

This is a web tutorial that teaches you how to use Canoma software without ever previously seeing the user interface before. Canoma is a software program that constructs 3 dimensional models from 2 dimensional pictures and does not have a steep learning curve for beginners to ascend.

With that said, lets start you on your way to creating your own 3D models. You first want to download the Canoma zip file that has the corresponding 2D images in them that will allow you to follow this tutorial much more easily. After downloading the zip file, the first thing you need to do is launch the Canoma application. Since we are starting from scratch, you want to create a New Model. . Then we would like to add in our 2D image to create the model from. To complete the previous 2 steps, select:

(1) File menu > New
(2) File menu > Add Image and open example1.jpg.

Now that we have an image to work from, we will now start creating the 3D wireframe structure. Make sure the creations tab is highlighted in the bottom left corner of the window.

The creation tab has many different wireframe selection shapes to choose from. If it is not selected, just click on it to select it. Just about all of the 3D models you will create in Canoma will start of with the Box wireframe. This example is no different, so you want to click on the Box wireframe to start modeling your 2D image (as you position your cursor over each shape in the creations window, it's name will appear in the top right portion of the creations window). A red wireframe box will appear somewhere in the center of your picture. Drag the wireframe box close to the box in the 2D image. We can now zoom in to where we have just the box and the wireframe in our window and get a more accurate representation of the box we are going to model. To zoom:

We are now ready to start pinning the corners of our wireframe to the box we want to model. We first want to click on the arrow from the toolbar – the selection tool. Then click and drag a corner of the wireframe to a corner of the box. A yellow triangle will appear when the cursor is positioned over a corner of the wireframe. Remember to only pin the corners that you are able to see. In this example, there are only 7 corners you are able to see on the box. If you mess up pinning a corner, just hit control + z to undo it. After you are done pinning all corners, your model should look very similar to this:

To rotate the view of the 3D model, click and drag across the trackball controller (bottom one). To translate the view, click and drag across the top three controls.

At any time you wish to get back to the original view, just click on the 2D image in the top left corner of the application window. After you are done roaming the different views, click on Edit to get back to edit mode.

Let’s see what are model in 3 dimensions looks like so far. To do this, we are going to utilize the quick textures command in Canoma. This applies textures to all objects in our image and automatically switches to view mode. Click the quick textures button (the rabbit in the toolbar at the top of the screen).

You can see that it definitely improves the model, but the table is not there that the box actually rests on. This is because we did not implement a ground plane into our model. This will give the program a feel for the orientation of the camera. To add in our ground plane, we have to first change back to edit mode and then click on the Horizontal Rectangle on the creation tab. Just like when clicking on the box, the wireframe rectangle appears in the middle of the image. And we now have to pin the corners to a horizontal surface in the image. The gray cloth on the table looks perfect for this! Pin all corners of the wireframe to the gray cloth in the image and your model should now look like this:

The box turns yellow to alert the user that it is not selected at this time. Now let’s try clicking on the quick texture button (rabbit) again to see our new updated 3D model. Use the trackball to preview and rotate our model in 3D. If you rotate around to view the back of the box, you can see that the texture is missing. This is because we do not have any texture information for the back of the box with only one picture.

Canoma will allow you to superimpose a picture taken from a different camera angle onto the model we have created so far. Thus, obtaining the texture information for the back of the box and for anything behind it. Luckily, the example we are working on contains a picture from a different camera angle. We now have to import this image into our existing project.

(1) File menu > Add Image and open example2.jpg.

When the new image is added in, our existing model appears on the screen in its wireframe format.

We now have to align our wireframe model with the new image we have imported. Aligning the wireframe first makes our 3D model and Canoma’s mathematics much more stable. Use the trackball to align the model by rotating the wireframe roughly 180 degrees to the same camera viewpoint of the 2nd image. Don’t worry about getting it exactly aligned because the next step will be to pin the corners of our existing wireframe to our new image.

After aligning the wireframe, the next step is to start pinning it to the second image. As you add pin after pin, the wireframe starts to take the exact shape of the new image. Finally, by clicking the quick textures button, it will generate a 3D model based on both photographs. By rotating our view around we can now see that the 3D model of our box looks very good.

However, if you noticed the cd case lying flat to the ground, you are not alone! To fix this we will want to create another box and pin as many corners as we can see to the cd case. It will probably help if we first zoom in on the case. Start pinning the corners to create a wireframe box like the one shown in the picture below:

To generate your final 3D model, click on the quick textures button. As you can see, just clicking the quick textures button leaves some white spaces around some of the edges of our 3D model. To fix this, we can use the quality textures button (the turtle). This takes a little longer, however the quality of our 3D model is much improved. And finally, you should save your 3D model (probably long before now). Your finished model should look something like this:

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