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Messages - jedfrechette

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1
General / Re: Transform Matrix is Translating Chunk to Incorrect Location
« on: November 01, 2023, 02:00:26 AM »
I'm not sure if this is the issue, but personally I would:
  • Import into WGS84 Lat/Long chunk
  • Transform chunk to UTM
  • Export dense cloud
  • Do external alignment
  • Import transform from external alignment

That way you're only doing the transform from Lat/Long to UTM once and there is less room for things to go wrong.

2
Bug Reports / Re: TIFF/LAB files displayed in Black White only
« on: September 05, 2023, 09:40:25 PM »
any merging/processing operation happening inside is assuming sRGB, so colors won't be optimal even if you assign back the right color profile to the final texture.

Do you have a reference for that as it doesn't seem to match the testing I've done?

At least when working with scene-linear floating point images it is entirely possible to generate accurate texture maps without Metashape doing any color management. Admittedly, I haven't tested this with integer image pipelines, so I suppose they could be attempting to do some sort of color management and messing things up. That seems somewhat unlikely to me though, based on what I've seen working with both the applications UI and its Python API.

3
Bug Reports / Re: TIFF/LAB files displayed in Black White only
« on: September 02, 2023, 01:46:36 AM »
ACES is not well supported by many RAW processors.

You mentioned Affinity Photo earlier. Have you tried it? If I remember correctly Affinity's raw development uses libraw, which has had good support for ACES for quite awhile. I know Affinity also has good support for ACES in general via OCIO so that shouldn't be an issue either. For development from camera raw to aces (stored as exrs) we use OpenImageIO, which also uses libraw, and it works well. As long as they expose the appropriate settings, I think any of the other front ends that rely on libraw to do the heavy lifting should also work fine.

With regard to ICC profiles, I presume that was in reference to ProPhoto not ACES?

The good thing about using Metashape and a scene linear ACES based workflow is that even though the display transform inside of Metashape isn't quite right and your images will look a little funny inside the application the underlying pixel values aren't modified. If your source images are in the correct colorspace the resulting texture maps will be generated correctly in the same color space and will render properly once you move them to an application that is color managed. In other words, the fact that Metashape doesn't attempt to do ad-hoc color management (like some other applications do) makes it work well inside of a color-managed pipeline.

If I had one feature request to make in this vein it would actually be for Metashape to adopt OpenImageIO and OpenColorIO for image handling and color management. I imagine that could require a significant development effort depending on how the existing code is structured, but it would provide a number of benefits to users including support for non-RGB images like you're asking for, additional image formats including RAW for many cameras, color management, and the ability for users to do pretty sophisticated image math and compositing within the application.


4
Bug Reports / Re: TIFF/LAB files displayed in Black White only
« on: August 31, 2023, 06:31:14 PM »
ACES AP0 covers the entire CIE 1931 standard-observer spectral locus so theoretically includes all visible colors (and more) but still has all the tooling benefits of using a RGB based color space, including working more or less seamlessly in Metashape. However, even that seems a bit overkill for most photogrammetry processes and the more user friendly ACEScg (AP1) seems like a better working color space if you just want to have a wide gamut scene referred color space.

5
Bug Reports / Re: TIFF/LAB files displayed in Black White only
« on: August 31, 2023, 01:51:20 AM »
LAB is a reference color space AND a document format, means all visible colors are there.

What's the benefit of this when you're dealing with images captured by a physical device that can't capture all of those colors anyway?

6
Bug Reports / Re: TIFF/LAB files displayed in Black White only
« on: August 30, 2023, 02:37:55 AM »
If you're just after a color space with a wider gamut, why not try something like ACEScg (or ACES if you absolutely must cover the entire visible spectrum) that is already pretty well supported by Agisoft?

7
Correct, I would not expect to see any significant differences with regard to the geometry. For multicamera rigs like this you usually want to end up with a different camera calibration for each physical camera so having them all be the same model doesn't necessarily help that much in that regard.

8
The biggest issue you'll have with mixing different camera models is that the color balance from the different sensors will vary slightly. It may be a challenge to smoothly blend the texture maps without very carefully normalizing the images ahead of time.

9
General / Re: Undistort Images no longer an option?
« on: December 28, 2022, 08:12:16 AM »
The removal of the ability to export undistorted images from the GUI was discussed in this thread:

https://www.agisoft.com/forum/index.php?topic=14738

along with some workarounds. Hopefully, one of them will work for you.

I can't say I've ever used undistorted images as part of a workflow to transfer alignments to RC so I can't vouch for how well that works in particular. But by using the Python API, which still includes the ability to export undistorted images, we're able to export images that are identical to images exported by the GUI in older versions. We've also used STMaps exported from the latest versions of Metashape to undistort the original photos externally and produce undistorted photos that are identical so it should be possible to achieve what you're after.

10
General / Re: Agisoft Metashape 2.0.0 pre-release
« on: October 21, 2022, 02:16:56 AM »
Currently alignment with preserving absolute transform is not supported.

That's unfortunate, but thank's for the the clear reply.

11
General / Re: Agisoft Metashape 2.0.0 pre-release
« on: October 19, 2022, 06:26:11 PM »
From reading this and the knowledge base entry I'm still not clear on exactly what effect this procedure will have on the transforms of the Laser Scans. Will the grouped and fixed laser scans maintain their position relative to each other while the entire group is still allowed to move?

Dear Jed,
Yes, the grouped and fixed laser scans will maintain their position relative to each other while the entire group is still allowed to move.

Can the entire group be locked in to place easily so that it is not allowed to move? That's something we've been asking for ever since laser scan support was introduced, e.g. this comment in the 1.7.0 prerelease thread:

https://www.agisoft.com/forum/index.php?topic=12653.msg56372#msg56372

12
Python and Java API / Please make the API more stable
« on: October 19, 2022, 05:02:51 AM »
One of the best things about Metashape is that it offers a complete Python API. However, that API is unnecessarily frustrating to use for 2 main reasons:

The first is documentation, which although it exists is rather minimal and very difficult to navigate due to being delivered as a pdf with no useful table of contents. An interactive webpage similar to docs.python.org would be much easier to use.

The second big cause of frustration is how much churn there is in the API. Right now while looking at the 2.0.0 changelog I see this:

  • Renamed PointCloud class to TiePoints
  • Renamed DenseCloud class to PointCloud

and can only imagine how much pain that is going to cause people who don't have their scripts version guarded. Now arguably, this is a major release so it is the right time to make these kinds of breaking changes. However, it seems like these kinds of breaking changes happen in almost every new version, including minor X.X.1 patch releases. For example 1.7.4 includes `Renamed ClusteringMethod enum to ClassificationMethod`. Searching for "Renamed' yields 177 hits in the changelog and that's just the beginning as there are many other breaking changes that were documented in other ways, i.e. removal of methods and functions, changing default arguments, and sometimes completely changing the way a method or function behaves.

Agisoft doesn't even attempt to keep their own example scripts up to date. When 1.8.0 was released, it appears they simply bumped the version number check on all the scripts in their example repo,

https://github.com/agisoft-llc/metashape-scripts/commit/e964870c639a66d76d05627cb76af8c7d5dbf7bd

without actually updating the scripts for any of the changes in that release and as a result many of those scripts have probably been broken for months.

Which brings me back to documentation. Because the written documentation is so sparse the best way to learn the Metashape API is via examples and experimentation. However, because the API is constantly changing many of the examples, both in public repos and in snippets on this forum are out of date and it is often difficult to figure out how to port them to the current API. That leaves experimentation, which is often needlessly time consuming and frustrating.

My 3 suggestions for how to improve this situation would be:
  • Follow semantic versioning, i.e. given a version number MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH, backwards compatibility can only be broken in a MAJOR release.
  • Test that provided example scripts are compatible with the currently released version. This will help users stay up to date on best practices, while helping assure that point 1 is being adhered to.
  • Move written documentation to a more usable platform than the pdf currently provided.

Please consider these suggestions to improve the stability and user friendliness of Metashape's API. I love the fact that Metashape provides such a detailed API, and we likely wouldn't be users if it didn't, however, its instability is a major hinderance and greatly reduces our ability to test and deploy new versions of the software.

13
General / Re: Agisoft Metashape 2.0.0 pre-release
« on: October 18, 2022, 10:57:47 PM »
To align images and laser scans you need to use Align Photos command from the Workflow menu and enable the Reset current alignment parameter in the Align photos dialog window (alignment within the group will be preserved).  But please note, before run alignment you need to group laser scans into a fixed group.
To create a group: Select laser scans on the Workspace pane and choose Move Laser Scans > New Laser Scan Group.
Fixed group: select Set Group Type > Fixed from the Group context menu.

From reading this and the knowledge base entry I'm still not clear on exactly what effect this procedure will have on the transforms of the Laser Scans. Will the grouped and fixed laser scans maintain their position relative to each other while the entire group is still allowed to move?

I think what a lot of us who use laser scans want is to be able to lock the transforms of the laser scans so that they are never moved and the laser scans are only ever used as imovable reference to align photos to prior to reconstruction.

14
General / Re: Network processing server licence
« on: September 03, 2022, 08:09:19 PM »
You do a full Metashape Pro install, but when you run the installed executable with the --server flag it doesn't check for a license.

After previously running the server on Windows, I recently set up a headless Linux VM to run our server. The process worked fine, the only thing that was a little annoying about not having a minimal 'server' installer was the need to install a bunch of GUI libraries on a machine that will never have a graphics display or do any processing. All in all it was pretty easy to get setup though and has been working well.

15
General / Re: Camera export: distortion model
« on: August 17, 2022, 06:25:41 PM »
It is just copy one value between tabs, I can live without that option in GUI  :).

You might be able to, but what about all of the other users who need this functionality? Are they going to find this thread or come up with the workaround by themselves? As far as I know this isn't documented anywhere else.

To me this just seems like a needless feature regression. This software has had the ability to export undistorted photos from the GUI for more than a decade, why was that feature removed now?

We're using the Python API to do this so aren't directly affected by this particular change, but the way Agisoft tends to somewhat arbitrarily remove or break features between point releases is one of my major frustrations with this software.

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