Photo2Rhino

Photo2Rhino (a Rhino 3D plugin) is a more flexible and interactive version of the Rhino commands heightfield and meshheightfield. Here are the advantages:

Brighten and change the contrast of the images before creating the mesh. Rotate and crop the images before creating the mesh. Interactively apply smoothing to the mesh. Optionally apply vignette effects to make the mesh flatter at the edges. Preview the mesh before insertion as a Rhino object. Choose the number of points in the mesh irrespective of the number of pixels in the image. Pick out important colors from the mesh by using the RGB sliders. See a profile of the mesh height as you adjust parameters in real time. Change the conversion from pixel to mesh height interactively to get the ideal mesh from less than ideal photographs and images.

Get the demo now so you can see for yourself the benefits while using own images. The full version costs US$29.95 and is available here.

A standalone version of this program is Photo2Mesh.