Making 3D model from 2D side view image with Smoothie-3D

Smoothie-3D: squirrel modeling - YouTube

I made a 3d fish model for my current project. As you can see in the above Youtube demo video, they made making 3d model really easy. It would have been quite a lot of work if I did this in blender from scratch...

Basically, you only need to upload a photo, preferably a side view of it and then outline each part that needs to be in a separate volume. This will give us a 3d mesh that we can scale, rotate, and move. After a few minutes, I got a fish model consisting of the main body and a few fins. This can be exported into blender or other 3D modeling tools. I think I exported it as obj file and then used Blender to import, and YABEE plugin to make an egg file for panda3d.

I think you can even see my fish model at http://smoothie-3d.com/?p=Itoi@8 if you are logged into Smoothie.