This time, in this fourth round with BAT – Blender Architectural Tips, I’ll focus into the Blender Camera photo-calibration.

With this technique you use the matching process to match an existing 3D model to a photo’s context. For example, you might have a model of a house that contains an addition and want to place that within a photo to show the change.

To achieve this result, we were supported by a tool called BLAM – Blender Camera Calibration Toolkit:

Project home: http://code.google.com/p/blam/

Download

To install the addon, you can use the download page of the Google Project: http://code.google.com/p/blam/downloads/list

Here download the latest version (at the time is 0.3) and install it through the “Install Addon” button in the Blender Preferences panel. After that, enable from the installed preferences

Usage

The first step to use this tool, is to open an image in the Movie Clip Editor:

Once opened the image in the editor you have to:

• Enable the Single or Two vanishing point camera calibration (in the Left panel)
• Create one or two Grease Pencil Layers following the instruction in the left panel (Eg Line set 1 first grease pencil layer)
• Draw one or two straight lines ( CTRL + D + LMB ) following the  vanishing points
• Set-up your camera data in the lower right panel, mine is a Canon 350D ( you can see your camera data in the exif data of your photos )
• Press Calibrate Active Camera to  enjoy:

Other infos

A really cool user guide is (of-course) the official one!

http://code.google.com/p/blam/wiki/UsersGuide