I got finished with my model and compared it to "ortho"(perspective distortion makes them not really ortho) photos of the studio model....didn't match up.....so I then tried scaling and stretching my model to fit match the studio model....it isn't within acceptable tolerances for me. I can't in good conscience make a physical model if it isn't 99.99 percent accurate to the real deal.
So I made the decision to start from square one. I realized early on that because of the perspective distortion, I can't use the ortho photos as a set of blueprints to start my model from, otherwise, I'll have a distorted end product.....I need a perfect set of ortho blueprints.
I'm currently working on photometrically reconstructing a 3d point cloud from the available 2d photos(3d scan) in order to create a perfect set of orthos. I wrote a macro that uses advanced algorithms to derive the surface data from photos that are available. This took many hours of work not including the pre-processing of the images. I've already got a rough mesh of the hull that I'll post later today. Keep in mind this is the only way I can get a 3d scan of the original model unless someone has one that I don't know about. Soon I can start over and make a visually perfect replica of the studio model.
I'm enjoying all of the challenges of this, but I'm learning quite a bit in reverse engineering an object just from photographs.
I'll post a pic of the 3d mesh I have so far from the reconstruction, it may look like a step backwards, but it really isn't. Once I write a filter to take the noise out and increase accuracy of pattern recognition, it should look pretty good.