Free Photo Scanning Workflow! (VisualSFM and Meshlab)
Why Blender Stack Exchange recommends it
Blender Stack Exchange answerers point people to it when someone asks how to build a 3D mesh from photos of a real object without paying for software.
Recommended by 2 people across 2 different months, 2017 to 2019.
What it is
A 24-minute tutorial by Gleb Alexandrov (Creative Shrimp) showing a free photogrammetry pipeline: take photos, reconstruct them with VisualSFM and CMVS-PMVS, clean the result in MeshLab, then view it in Blender. It is a walkthrough of the tools and steps, with project files provided.
What people said
Recommends Zaif · 2017-11 · Blender Stack Exchange · on “Mesh reconstruction using tracking data”
I believe you are looking for something like this: [this video] . It uses a few third party softwares (totally free) to construct meshes from pictures you take of a real-world object. Better yet, it does all the tracking and data sorting for you, so all you have to do is take the pictures and input them into the programs. Hope that helps!
Recommends Rick · 2019-04 · Blender Stack Exchange · on “Photogrammetry using blender to Create a Dense Mesh and automatically texture them”
There is a free workflow (but not with Blender). Gleb Alexandrov made a video about it: [this video] You use VisualSFM + Meshlab. Personally I bought an Agisoft license, it's an ok price for an one-time payment :)
Cites mr-matt · 2018-11 · Blender Stack Exchange · on “Get an object scanned for use in blender”
There are many different programs available for 3D Scanning. I think these are probably the best (give highest quality results) and are the easiest to use. RealityCapture [LINK] , great for huge environments taken from drones but it's very expensive. Agisoft Photoscan [LINK] , probably the best value imo but still a tad expensive Meshroom [LINK] , free on github, I've had pretty good results with this 123D Catch, rubbish results but free and very easy to use. I have a feeling it's been discontinued tho. All of these can export the mesh as .OBJ I think, blender can import this. Be prepared for a slow experience though, 3D scans can have millions of poly's. You'll need a decent camera to take