Messages

1

Bug Reports / Re: Textures are completely messed up in 2.1 (tested with fisheye lens)

« on: October 25, 2023, 04:50:57 AM »

Hello jenkinsm,

Is the texture affected only for Fisheye cameras or whether the same issue happens for Frame type of the camera sensor? Please also specify the texture generation parameters used in 2.1 version and check, if the same result is obtained regardless the GPU selection in Metashape preferences windows.

I will test that soon. In the meantime, in preparation for testing, I put 2.1 on my Mac and opened an existing fisheye project (same lens/camera as the test I did on Windows). The textures loaded incorrectly, and look a lot like the other bad textures i got on Windows. I created these textures in 2.0.3 and they worked fine.

However, I was able to generate proper textures on Mac with that same project. (Image 2)

2

Bug Reports / Textures are completely messed up in 2.1 (tested with fisheye lens)

« on: October 20, 2023, 11:45:11 PM »

I'm starting to test the use of a fisheye lens for my projects and the initial results in 2.0.1 on Mac OS were excellent. I installed 2.1 on my Windows PC and did another test - the mesh is great, but the textures are completely wrong. It's even placing texture where there is no mesh. See attached photos.

I'm about to roll back to 2.0.3 on Windows to see if the problem still exists. I am also testing the same photos on Mac. I'll update this post if I learn anything else relevant.

3

General / Advice needed for a tricky project

« on: April 02, 2023, 09:53:50 PM »

I'm wondering if anyone has advice for how to deal with this specific issue: I am making an indoor go-kart track and I have a complete set of photos for the whole building. Roughly half of the photos are close-up oblique shots of the track surface itself, and the rest of the images cover the building (walls, support beams, etc.)

If I align and make a mesh from only the photos of the track surface, the track turns our relatively good. Very little noise and overall a result I am happy with.

The problem occurs when I try to make a mesh that includes the images of the walls and support structures. Those images also show parts of the track surface, although not in much detail. The mesh made from all of the photos has a very noisy track surface, which makes it unusable for baking normal maps.

What can I do to "force" Metashape to use the close-up track surface images for that part of the mesh and ignore the track surface shown in the other images?

I'm looking for a semi-automated solution that doesn't involve masking images individually.

So far I've tried to generate masks on the "walls" images after making a mesh of the track surface only, but this resulted in some areas getting masked out that shouldn't be. I think it's because the track is on two levels with a ramp, so MS is masking areas that show the underside of the upper level.

I have also tried aligning just the track images, reducing the overlap, then aligning the "walls" images with the existing aligned track images, and making a mesh from that. The resulting mesh is pretty much the same.

Is there something I'm missing that would get me the results I'm after?

4

Bug Reports / Seems like 2.0 is using more RAM to generate textures

« on: March 10, 2023, 12:21:50 AM »

I haven't done a direct back-to-back comparison, but I was able to generate 8K, 16K, and 32K textures before upgrading to 2.0 and now it seems like I'm limited to 4k textures. The projects I'm testing now are much smaller with much fewer pictures, but the scene is very different so that might be a factor here.

Has Metashape been altered to use more RAM when generating textures? I'll try to do an A/B test between 1.8 and 2.0 to provide more concrete data. Right now I'm pretty frustrated, so I hope this is a bug and not a new limitation.

5

Python and Java API / Re: Help needed - Problem using OpenCV in Metashape (related to numpy)

« on: March 09, 2023, 09:05:04 AM »

Hello jenkinsm,

What version of Metashape Pro do you have installed and what OS you are using?

Hi Alexey, I am using 2.0.1 on Windows 10 Pro version 10.0.19045 Build 19045

6

General / Re: Optimizing Processing Time?

« on: March 05, 2023, 06:10:16 AM »

A project like yours would take a few hours at most on modern hardware. CPU speed is extremely important here, followed by GPU and RAM speed. RAM quantity matters but doesn't affect speed much. More RAM allows you to create large projects.

Metashape automatically uses your hardware "to the fullest" - if it's not, then there is a bottleneck somewhere. A common bottleneck is your storage device. Use an SSD, not a hard drive, to store your project images. Otherwise, the hard drive will likely be a bottleneck. You can check this in Task Manager - if the drive with your images is at 100% usage, then it's a bottleneck

If you're talking about upgrading your existing components, it's probably better to build a completely new PC. You should get the CPU with the fastest clock speed that you can afford. A 13900KS would be at the top of my list for a new PC, but that's $700 for the CPU alone. So instead you might want to look at an older CPU like a 10900K that can run at or above 5 GHz (that's what I have). You would need a powerful water cooler to achieve 5+ GHz full-time, but it blazes through photogrammetry projects like nobody's business. It's a lot faster than a 4.5 GHz Xeon with 48 threads, even though it only has 20 threads.

If you are not ready to upgrade, you should overclock your existing CPU as much as possible. That will help speed up your processing and might only cost as much as a good air cooler or AIO water cooling loop.

The GTX 1070 is OK for making depth maps but it has little to no impact on creating a dense cloud since that happens on the CPU. Upgrading your GPU will help speed up the depth map generation and image matching, but not much else.

Lastly, do you really need the point cloud in the first place? You should try making your mesh using depth maps only and see if the results are satisfactory. That's a much faster process to begin with and would take a lot less time to create a mesh.

7

General / Re: Optimizing Processing Time?

« on: March 05, 2023, 06:07:11 AM »

A project like yours would take a few hours at most on modern hardware. CPU speed is extremely important here, followed by GPU and RAM speed. RAM quantity matters but doesn't affect speed much. More RAM allows you to create large projects.

Metashape automatically uses your hardware "to the fullest" - if it's not, then there is a bottleneck somewhere. A common bottleneck is your storage device. Use an SSD, not a hard drive, to store your project images. Otherwise, the hard drive is likely to be a bottleneck. You can check this in Task Manager - if the drive with your images is at 100% usage, then it's a bottleneck

If you're talking about upgrading your existing components, it's probably better to build a completely new PC. You should get the CPU with the fastest clock speed that you can afford. A 13900KS would be at the top of my list for a new PC, but that's $700 for the CPU alone. So instead you might want to look at an older CPU like a 10900K that can run at or above 5 GHz (that's what I have). You would need a powerful water cooler to achieve 5+ GHz full-time, but it blazes through photogrammetry projects like nobody's business. It's a lot faster than a 4.5 GHz Xeon with 48 threads, even though it only has 20 threads.

If you are not ready to upgrade, you should overclock your existing CPU as much as possible. That will help speed up your processing and might only cost as much as a good air cooler or AIO water cooling loop.

The GTX 1070 is OK for making depth maps but it has little to no impact on creating a dense cloud since that happens on the CPU.

Lastly, do you really need the point cloud in the first place? You should try making your mesh using depth maps only and see if the results are satisfactory. That's a much faster process to begin with and would take a lot less time to create a mesh.

8

Python and Java API / Help needed - Problem using OpenCV in Metashape (related to numpy)

« on: March 05, 2023, 05:55:27 AM »

I'm still learning Python and don't know much, so please tell me if what I'm trying to do is impossible.

I used ChatGPT to write a script that uses OpenCV to mask out the sky in my input images and another script that will detect cars and mask them out.

I installed OpenCV both within Metashape using pip and on my system, and I made sure that my system version of Python is 3.9, same as in Metashape.

Unfortunately, when I try 'import cv2' in Metashape, it gives an error saying that numpy is not installed and I need to install it using 'pip install numpy' — but when I do that, it says that numpy is already found in the installation directory.

I'm stuck in this loop where OpenCV thinks numpy isn't installed, but in reality it is installed.

What am I doing wrong here? How can I get it to work?

9

Python and Java API / Is it possible to change a node's capability (Any/CPU/GPU) for SUB-steps?

« on: February 20, 2023, 06:51:12 AM »

I want to set a different capability for specific nodes based on which of these functions is being performed:

MatchPhotos.detect
MatchPhotos.prematch
MatchPhotos.match

For .detect I would want the nodes that do not have a GPU to be set to "Any" because they can detect points nearly as quickly as the GPU nodes.

For .prematch and .match I need to set those nodes to "CPU" because they are way too slow compared to the GPU nodes, so the rest of the nodes complete while those take forever.

I looked thru the Python API reference and searched for "prematch" but nothing came up, which makes me think this is not currently possible.

Does anyone know if this can be done and how?

If it's not possible now, then it certainly needs to be added in order to use network processing as efficiently as possible.

Thanks!

10

Python and Java API / Re: Need help with my script: must re-open project and loop after network processing

« on: February 18, 2023, 07:13:33 PM »

No longer relevant

11

Python and Java API / [SOLVED] my script: must re-open project and loop after network processing

« on: February 18, 2023, 06:18:00 PM »

I figured it all out.

12

General / Re: Tilt-shift lens

« on: January 30, 2023, 12:59:25 PM »

Thanks for the info, it is much appreciated. I hope I'll get a chance to play with one someday anyway.

Did you ever get one to try out? I am scanning roads and I think a tilt-shift lens would work perfectly. I came across this today and I think I will get one and try it out.

13

General / Re: Weird banding/noise pattern in mesh from depth maps

« on: January 20, 2023, 12:34:48 AM »

Hello jenkinsm,

Maybe you can take a subset of images for the problematic area (like <200-300 images) and see, it the problem is still observed there?

Hi Alexey,

Sorry for the long delay in following up on this. I just sent the project file and source image to the support team. Hopefully they can help fix this!

14

General / Re: Can I use Network Processing between my home computer and AWS?

« on: January 16, 2023, 01:43:08 AM »

After I typed my post, I remembered an app called Hamachi that makes it easy to set up VPN tunnels. I used that and already have the network processing working with two AWS instances and my home PC!

If anyone has suggestions to improve the setup, I am open to ideas. But this was way easier than I expected!

For anyone who wants to try something similar, I did have to open port 5840 in Windows Firewall after setting up Hamachi.

15

General / Can I use Network Processing between my home computer and AWS?

« on: January 16, 2023, 12:07:40 AM »

I have started exploring the use of AWS to speed up my photogrammetry workflow and so far, none of the AWS instances I have tried are faster than my home desktop computer.

They each have strengths and weaknesses (for example, one instance has 48 threads at 4.5 GHz and 1.5 TB of RAM - but no GPUs...) so I was thinking to try and include one or more AWS instances in a processing network that also includes my home computer(s). That way, I can use each machine for their strengths without having to transfer entire projects into the cloud and back down again.

Is this possible? I tried setting it up using the IP address of the AWS server but I'm guessing port 5840 is blocked somewhere and I would need to open it.

I know that the drive with the project files has to be shared and accessible on all computers, and I am thinking to use Google Drive File Streaming for that (it has the same drive letter on every machine). But this may not work since it'd appear as a local drive on each machine and not a network drive.

Has anyone done this successfully? What steps do I need to take to get it working? Use tunneling through a VPN?

For the record, I have gigabit internet (both upload and download) so I'm not too concerned with that being a bottleneck. I've already tried network processing at home on a gigabit LAN and it works fine.

Any advice is welcome. Thanks!