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Download The Model From Sketchfab: Here

Why I Did This

I have always loved spaceflight and the International Space Station, I try to photograph it whenever I can. One thing that always bothered me was I could never get a good sense of what the station looked like on the inside. There are pictures, diagrams, and maps, but I could never get a good three dimensional mental image of what it was like.

There is a Google StreetView style model here that is very high resolution, but the jumping between images and locations is somewhat disorienting and jarring to me. I wanted an interior view of the station that I could smoothly move around in as if I was an astronaut floating around.

Until NASA picks me to become an astronaut I figured I had to come up with my own solution. I found a YouTube video that gave a tour of the US side of the station with no people in the shot and it struck me that I could try to create a 3D model of the station using photogrammetry. I’ve never tried photogrammetry or 3D modeling before, so this was all a new experiment for me (so please be kind about whatever modeling sins I’m sure I’ve committed).

For those who don’t know, photogrammetry is a process where you infer the 3D structure of an object from a series of photographs. With enough images from different perspectives you can accurately recreate the subject that was photographed in 3D. This project is especially difficult because I don’t have the capability of taking any new or better photographs if there are any tricky spots, until I get to ride a rocket I’m stuck with the videos provided by ISS astronauts.

Once I become an astronaut I promise I’ll take better photos and videos while I’m in orbit, but until then this is the best I can offer!

How I Did This

Videos I Used:

  • US side of the station: YouTube

  • Nauka Module: YouTube

  • Russian side of the station (pre-Nauka module arriving): YouTube

Software I Used:

I also tried Meshroom and RealityCapture for photogrammetry with less luck. Meshroom wasn’t giving me good results and took forever to process. RealityCapture was fast and had good results but didn’t match what I was getting from 3DF Zephyr.

To get the raw photos for the photogrammetry I downloaded the three YouTube videos and broke them into individual image frames using a simple python script. From that point I down sampled my video frames to have a reasonable amount of photos for my laptop to process. I created a spreadsheet to note when and where each series of images was, for example which photos relate to floating a single direction through the Kibo module. Each module ended up being generated from ~75-200 individual photos.

Initially I thought I could model the entire US side as a single photogrammetry model, but I couldn’t align the cameras well enough to do it in a single shot. Instead I modeled each ISS module individually and then pieced them together in Blender. I’ve never used blender before so my modeling skills are nothing impressive, and I’m sure there are many people out there that could do this better and cleaner than I did.

The Russian side of the station had many blind spots, so there are areas of the model that I had to manually fill in, those appear as single color polygon connectors. It’s ugly, but the images just didn’t have the content to fill in those spots. Another thing that made the Russian side difficult is that the two videos I used had astronauts in the field of view that I had to mask out (apologies Sunita Williams and Thomas Pesquet!).

Results

Considering I went into this project with no photogrammetry or 3D modeling skills I am thrilled with the final model I got. The Russian side is a bit messy and I can’t confirm the module sizing and relative positioning is 100% correct, but it’s close enough to give a sense of place and scale.

The Good

The model shows the entire ISS as it is today in 2024, and the textures are relatively good. If you don’t look too closely at any single thing the station looks great, but if you focus too much on any given part you can see some problems. It’s a bit like flying through the ISS in a dream.

The Bad

Some parts of the station only had images of the module from a single direction. For example, the tranquility module which connects to Node 1 and the cupula. Going towards the cupula looks good (kinda), but the way back out of the module is very rough because there was no information there to complete the model.

The BEAM module isn’t represented very well, it didn’t totally make it into the field of view in the videos.

The Ugly

I can’t help but compare my model to this one. They only did the US portion of the ISS, seemingly using the same source video I did, and their model is GORGEOUS. Clearly, I need to work on my photogrammetry skills.