Topics

1

Feature Requests / COPC .laz support for exporting point cloud

« on: April 13, 2022, 12:17:28 PM »

There is a push in the open source community for a new, backwards-compatible way of formatting tiled .laz files called COPC. The result is a single laz file that can be streamed/has LOD etc etc, which previously were restricted to potree/entwine exports which consists of thousands of files. At the same time it can be opened using all the standard laz reading methods, as it is "just a laz", in a manner similar to a cloud optimized geotiff is "just a tiff".

If Metashape would add support for exporting point clouds directly this would be really beneficial, since this would significantly reduce the overhead of using/showing others the billion-points large point clouds we routinely produce.

QGIS will support simple drag-and-drop copc laz in 3.26, and potree 2.0 will support copc as well. PDAL supports reading/writing copc as of 2.4.0. I am not sure about Cloudcompare, but I hope it will support copc.

A couple of helpful links:
https://copc.io
https://pdal.io/stages/writers.copc.html
https://www.lutraconsulting.co.uk/crowdfunding/elevation-pointcloud-enhancements-qgis/

2

Feature Requests / 360 Panorama alignment to world

« on: November 11, 2021, 05:10:42 PM »

The panoramic results from MS are great, but lacks automatic horizon alignment. Aligning the horizon has to be done manually, and as far as I can see, can only be done on on single-image chunks. The same holds for aligning images to north.

If, on the other hand, we use multiple camera stations that are aligned with eac hother and perhaps a few GCPS, then it it is not possible to rotate object as is suggested in the tutorial at https://agisoft.freshdesk.com/support/solutions/articles/31000148830. It is currently possible to align multiple camera stations with each other, and thus also with GCPs. Therefore, the exterior orientation of the panorama should be known. Yet, when I try to output the results, the panorama is randomly rotated.

I thus suggest the following feature. If the ingoing spherical panorama has a known exterior orientation, then allow us to export the panorama perfectly levelled and with the equirectangular center pointing exactly north. This would allow usage of Metashape for perfectly georeferenced 360 dataset generation.