Topics

1

General / Dense cloud too big, how to reduce it?

« on: September 18, 2018, 11:49:22 AM »

Hi, I created a dense cloud with high quality settings (64M points) and another one with ultra high quality settings (256M points). I tried to generate a 3D mesh from the 256M points one, but it was going to take too much time so I aborted it. I actually only need a 167M polys mesh output, so a 90M dense cloud would be enough. I would like to reduce my 256M cloud to 90M points. Is there a way to do this? Thanks.

2

General / Does mesh reconstruction provide photo-based colors in the additional geometry?

« on: September 11, 2018, 09:34:55 AM »

(PhotoScan Standard)
Hi, I would like to know whether high resolution mesh reconstruction from dense cloud can bring additional vertex colors taken from the photos. I read in the manual the additional geometry could use interpolation, but what about the colors of the new vertices, are they interpolations too or taken from the actual photos? If so, this would mean we can lower the resolution of images used for dense cloud generation while preserving the ability to have accurate vertex colors in the final mesh.

3

Bug Reports / Mesh selection regression in 1.4.2

« on: May 07, 2018, 12:05:50 PM »

Hi, in PhotoScan 1.4.2 standard, if we open a project having a mesh and we want to duplicate or export the mesh, this is not possible unless we select (i.e. double click) on the mesh. Previously in 1.4.1 this was possible without having to select the mesh. Selecting the mesh can be very time consuming for big meshes, so I would ask to please restore the behavior of 1.4.1.

4

Bug Reports / PLY export vertex color issue

« on: April 12, 2018, 11:53:07 AM »

Hi, PLY export doesn't seem to export properly vertex colors. I am exporting from PhotoScan Standard 1.4.1 (on Windows) a 2 millions mesh with vertex colors in PLY format, trying to open it in ZBrush and Blender. In ZBrush, colors are wrong, in Blender, I don't see colors. If now I export the same mesh with vertex colors as FBX, I can see proper colors in both ZBrush and Blender.

5

General / How to handle scaling and orientation in PhotoScan Standard?

« on: April 06, 2018, 10:34:16 PM »

Hi, when I export a mesh from PhotoScan (as fbx), it appears very tiny (less than 1cm) in other software. Also its orientation is completely off, rotation seems random. I would like to know how to get proper scaling and orientation before exporting. How can I set up the scaling of my mesh or dense cloud? How do I know how to rotate the model to make sure what I see as top will actually be top in other software?

6

General / Issue with merging chunks

« on: April 03, 2018, 08:36:17 AM »

(PhotoScan Standard 1.4.1)

Hi, I took shots of an object on the ground on one side (side A) then I turned it over and took side B. In PhotoScan, I have created two chunks and generated a separate dense cloud for each side. Then I wanted to merge the two dense clouds into a single one, but had no success with this. I did Align Chunks then Merge Chunks but this generated a dense cloud with the two sides next to each other instead of merged as a single object. I don't think PhotoScan is able to recognize the two sides are from a single object. I would need to be able to manually position the dense clouds in a way they can match, but how I can do that? When I activate a chunk, the other one is not displayed anymore on screen, so I cannot have any reference for positioning.

7

Bug Reports / Stall at project opening due to default mesh selection

« on: March 27, 2018, 09:36:26 AM »

Hi, in current PhotoScan Standard (1.4.1), when opening a psx projet, if the latter contains a 3D mesh, PhotoScan will select and display it by default. This mesh can dozens of millions of polys and can stall the machine for long seconds before the project opens. Subsequently, every operation in Photoscan will take an enormous amount of time before proceeding until we select another objet such as a point or sparse cloud. Please do NOT select and open any mesh by default when opening a project !

8

General / Orientation for 2.5D projection

« on: March 18, 2018, 05:56:18 PM »

Hi, there are some dense clouds I would like to process as surfaces, even though they are not really surfaces, but I'd like to project them on a plane surface from a certain view/orientation. The problem is that PhotoScan, when building a mesh with the 2.5D option, is choosing a projection based on I don't know what exactly (the actual "top" on the world I think), but it doesn't always do the projection I want (I want to project from a side instead of the top). I would like to be able to tell PhotoScan what "side" of the dense cloud to project on a plate to build the 2.5D mesh. Is this possible? I tried to rotate the dense could into various orientations but to no avail. If this is not yet possible can this be added as a new feature? Thanks.

9

General / Need solution to work with large meshes

« on: March 16, 2018, 11:23:49 PM »

Hi, I reported earlier that FBX export for meshes above a certain size was not working on Windows, it just hangs and never completes. On Mac the export can complete, but above 67 million polys the mesh is not written properly (black area in bake). There are a few other formats that can be used to export with vertex color, such as PLY, Collada and Alembic. I am using Substance Designer to bake the high poly meshes, but the latter does not support PLY and Alembic. It does support Collada though, but is unable to process the DAE mesh from PhotoScan. I don't know if the problem is due to PhotoScan or Designer yet (or both), but basically this solution is not working. So this is all very problematic as in the end, I didn't find a single manner to export large meshes that can be used into Designer...

10

General / GPU questions

« on: March 15, 2018, 05:25:41 PM »

Hi, I am currently using a GTX1070 GPU and PhotoScan identifies it as a "15 compute units GPU". This GPU has 1920 CUDA cores, so is there a relationship between the number of CUDA cores and the compute units (and what are these "compute units?)

More generally, what should we be looking at in terms of GPU to use with PhotoScan ? Is this the number of CUDA or OpenCL cores? Is this the memory? Anything else?

11

Bug Reports / Issue aligning photos multiple times

« on: March 13, 2018, 03:43:20 PM »

PhotoScan 1.4.1 Standard

When aligning photos, then deleting the sparse points cloud then re-aligning photos, at some point the new sparse points cloud becomes empty.  Only way I found is to restart PhotoScan.

12

Feature Requests / Finer quality management for dense point cloud generation

« on: March 12, 2018, 11:11:15 PM »

PhotoScan 1.4.1 Standard.

Hi, the computing power difference between the High and Highest settings in dense point cloud generation can be considerable. The documentation says the Highest setting works on the original image size whereas the High settings works on images twice smaller. Would it be possible to have intermediate steps, ideally a 0 to 1 scaling with 1=original size, 0.5 half size (High) and so on. This way we could choose something like 0.7 if we want something in between High and Highest.

Also, could PhotoScan provide and quick and rough estimate the number of points of the final dense cloud without doing all the calculations? This way we could set a quality settings that would match a specific number of points. The idea is, knowing the target poly count we want in the final mesh, we would generate a dense point cloud with just enough points in order to generate this target poly count (provided there is computable relationship between the two).

13

General / Reusing higher density mesh to generate lower density mesh

« on: March 01, 2018, 06:22:02 PM »

(PhotoScan 1.4.1 Standard)
I usually generate two meshes from the dense cloud, a very high resolution one and a medium resolution one. The second mesh could be generated simply by decimating the first mesh, but even if I build the high res. mesh first, PhotoScan builds the second mesh from the dense cloud instead of reusing the higher resolution mesh, which is a waste of time. Is there a way to just decimate the higher res. mesh to a lower resolution without recalculating everything? If not can this feature be added in a future version? Thanks!

14

Bug Reports / FBX export ultra slow on Windows

« on: March 01, 2018, 06:00:55 PM »

I am exporting a 134 million faces mesh with vertex colors as FBX on Windows and after 3 hours the mesh export is still not complete. I exported smaller meshes with the Windows version before and this was also extremely slow (not that slow though, but mesh was smaller). Comparatively I have been using PhotoScan on a Mac and even though i didn't export such large meshes (can't because not enough RAM), comparatively to the Windows version it seemed to me the export on Mac was way faster. PhotoScan Standard 1.4.1, 64GB of RAM on Windows, 32GB ram on Mac.

15

General / Generating dense cloud/mesh on some cameras only

« on: March 01, 2018, 10:18:15 AM »

Hi, I have photos of a large plane. Instead of building a dense cloud/mesh for the whole plane, I would like to split it in two parts and generate a different dense cloud/mesh for each part. Ideally I would like to align all photos to get a tie points cloud, then select the cameras to split from this cloud and move them into another chunk, then build separate dense clouds and meshes for each chunk. Well, it seems it doesn't work this way! I am able to move the selected cameras into a new chunk, but I cannot build either a tie point or a dense cloud for this new chunk. Can someone please explain how I can proceed?
Using PhotoScan Standard 1.4.1.