How to do photogrammetry within Blender? Photogrammetry is really frustrating. The good tools are really expensive, and the free tools are either really old, or really difficult to get working because they're pet-projects... or they're Autodesk.

Current workflows use one tool to reconstruct the structure. Often either a Structure From Motion approach, or a multi-view stereo approach. Then another tool is used to turn those results into a mesh, almost always MeshLab. And another tool to texture using the photographs, often MeshLab and/or Blender.

Blender has all the functionality to identify features in an image and match those features across multiple images. We do it with motion tracking all the time. Blender also has the functionality to project those features into 3D, as with the empties that get produced when doing any kind of motion tracking. Blender also has the functionality to turn a point-cloud into a mesh.

Are there any tools/addons for doing photogrammetry or digital reconstruction from within Blender, without external applications?
Although quite labor intensive, and far from automatic (but certainly cheap), it would be possible imagine a workflow using tracking information to reconstruct objects based on photographs.

Using a rotatory platform photograph an object. Bring the image sequence into the Movieclip editor and track as many of the object's features as you can.



Solve the scene and setup a tracking scene.

On the 3D viewport enable Motion Tracking.

Instead of your object moving you'll be presented with a camera that moves around a bunch of markers (the tracked points on the image sequence).

Using those markers you'll have some guidelines to reconstruct the geometry of your object.





Or you can select all your trackers and convert them to vertices by using
3D Markers to Mesh.

That will create an object with a point cloud of unconnected vertices. You can then connect the dots...





Once you are done with the modeling, you can use some of the same photos to project the textures onto the UV unwrapped model using the UV project modifier and the camera as projector.