Messages

31

General / Re: Masking

« on: February 25, 2013, 04:47:48 AM »

If your object doesn't move, not masking during alignment and then using the mask during model generation may be helpful to speed things up, but it depends on your object & photos. Masking can also let you move the object (such as flipping it over), but then even lighting becomes an issue for textures.

32

General / Re: How to spped up process?

« on: February 21, 2013, 09:08:52 AM »

I agree it would be nice to have a feature to select every "x" photos  instead of selecting them every time by hand... i think about this every time I have to select / deselect a bunch of photos...

33

General / Re: Cannot Project a cam for all of my photos shows up unaligned, scan is TERRIBLE

« on: February 16, 2013, 12:23:02 AM »

Sorry I cannot answer questions about advanced alignment tools, I only have the standard version of photoscan. I have just been doing a lot of reading through these forums about how to improve my own scans.

34

General / Re: 5 or 6 tries, no results! Basic questions here

« on: February 16, 2013, 12:19:31 AM »

Pick an object with a lot of texture and not shinny. Try putting the object on a table and walk around it taking pictures, Don't move the object. (Turntables are very challenging but possible) Masking can help but is not necessary. If your object has texture you will not need to tape on marker points. Your photos should be taken about every 15 degrees but make sure you take some higher and some lower to capture more overlapping images. You may need to capture between 30 to 80 photos, but it depends on your object.

35

General / Re: Cannot Project a cam for all of my photos shows up unaligned, scan is TERRIBLE

« on: February 15, 2013, 11:32:06 PM »

I think you need to buy the professional version to get the advance marking and manual aligning features. However, I believe if you practice taking the photos better using objects that dont move, you may be able to scan a whole face at one time and process the photos in one chunk. Also, the camera you are using makes a difference. Most people using this software are using a DSLR with a professional lens.  Iwas also looking over your images you posted and noticed some of your photos appear square, did you crop these? the EXIF data is useless to photoscan if you crop the photos.

36

General / Re: Cannot Project a cam for all of my photos shows up unaligned, scan is TERRIBLE

« on: February 15, 2013, 09:40:04 PM »

Assuming your model can stay very still, try walking around your model whle taking the photos every 15 degrees, and do this again looking up and again looking down. Im guessing 30 to 50 photosmight do it... If that doesnt work, then use the masking tool and completely crop out the face in every image, this will help camera alignment a little because of the subject moving relative to the room... photoscan references everything in your photo, so removing the room from calculations will help alignments. Its just a lot more work and dont expect perfect results. Your current photos might work a little better if you masked out the background, however you should be using more photos too since photoscan needs to have overlapping images. That is also described in the photoscan documentation...

37

General / Re: Sharpness and focal length

« on: February 15, 2013, 09:59:22 AM »

Thanks for the IS comment, this makes good sense.

It has been my understanding that as long as your images are un-edited and still retain all their exif camera data, then mixing cameras, lenses or focal lengths should not be a problem. Assuming you stick within a certain range of focal lengths. I have read some posts on this forum that suggest mixing cameras is not a problem. Although I would also like to hear what focal lengths people have been most successful using and with what camera body.

38

General / Re: Sharpness and focal length

« on: February 14, 2013, 10:25:44 AM »

Tape is a good solution.

As far as lenses go I have been trying a Canon 16-35 L lens on a cropped sensor 450d and am getting decent results, but I am also uncertain about how wide angle of a lens is too wide for photoscan. I have been shooting the photos in about the 18 - 25mm range and have been trying to scan various non-planar objects that are a meter or less in size. I am having issues on some models with holes in my geometry, however I believe this is more due to how the photos were taken than about how wide the lens is. I have had some good results with some simple cube-shapped objects which were almost all shot near the 16mm range with the cropped sensor camera. That particular model only used about 40 photos, but a similar model using about 70 photos had some issues with holes in the model. I am finding that fine tuning the settings for each model makes a big difference...

Since your lense is similar build quality to mine and we have overlapping focal lengths, I believe it would be safe to say your lens is fine. You may even have an advantage by having the IS lens because photoscan appears to work much better when you use high f-stops and low ISO, which requires you to have a lot of light to not get blury photos if your shooting handheld.

Personally I would like to know if people here have better results with an IS lense (or VR for Nikon users) since there are now some prime lenses with IS. Has anyone tried a lense such as the Canon 28mm IS with photoscan?

39

General / Re: Export chunk to separate .psv file?

« on: February 09, 2013, 07:50:46 PM »

My intention is to use the batch processing tools while I sleep at night, so everything is done processing in the morning. I have put each object into a separate chunk even though they are unrelated as a single project. I'm sure I would have problems starting multiple instances of photoscan since there isn't a unifying batch tool.

So the way I understand it, the fastest way for me to do this is with python scripting, but I currently only have the standard edition so I will have to just duplicate my project file after and then delete the extra chunks.

40

General / Export chunk to separate .psv file?

« on: February 09, 2013, 11:09:49 AM »

Is there a way to export a single chunk to separate .psv file? This would be useful for me because I create photos for multiple objects and then process them at the same time using the batch tool. So when I finish I want to reorganize the project files into their respective folders. I could copy the same .csv file into each folder and then open each one up and delete the extra chunks, however this seems time consuming so I am looking for a better way.

41

Feature Requests / Add "Section View" tool for temporary cutaway view

« on: February 08, 2013, 12:29:57 AM »

Since most of the objects I am creating are not planar, I am finding that when I use the selection tools to delete faces I do not want, I often end up selecting the front faces as well as the back faces of my model. Other software I have used avoid this by using a section view tool that will allow you to make a temporary cutaway. This can be done by moving or rotating a plane to the position you want and everything on one side of the plane is hidden from view. Something like this would allow the current selection tool to work more effectively and would also allow you to more control to look at certain "hard to get to" faces on the model.

42

Feature Requests / Re: User friendly view rotation & zoom

« on: February 06, 2013, 09:07:17 PM »

Another view tool that is very helpful is a "Previous View" tool that will backup a couple of views in case you accidentally found yourself looking at some part of the model you didn't want to. Which I have found happens a lot.

43

Feature Requests / User friendly view rotation & zoom

« on: February 06, 2013, 08:42:12 PM »

I have a suggestion to improve the view rotation and zoom in PhotoScan, since I find it to be a little clumsy compared to other software I have used.

The default view rotation in Photoscan appears to rotate around the center of the model, which is great unless you are zoomed in on a specific area and want to rotate around it. This is where Photoscan gets clumsy.

My favorite style of view rotation is in a mechanical modeling software I use called Solidworks. Solidworks will similarly rotate the view around the center of the object, but it also has an additional way to rotate the view using the cursor depending on if the cursor is hovered over the model or over free space. If the cursor is hovered over free space, then the view will rotate around the center of the object, but if the cursor is hovered over the model, then the software will rotate around the "selected" surface the cursor was hoovered over. This allows you rotate around a specific area while zoomed in. This eliminates the need to be constantly panning around to get to what you wanted to look at and is much more user friendly.

Another feature Solidworks utilizes is when zooming with the mouse wheel. The viewport will zoom towards when the cursor is located on the screen. This can be useful because it also eliminates the need for panning completely if you just move the wheel in and out towards the selected area you want to look at.

I am not suggesting you eliminate the pan feature, it is a good tool, however these additional techniques seem to be a lot faster than the way Photoscan currently works.

I found an older youtube video that describes what I am talking about.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJ_uNS9zgwQ

44

Feature Requests / Re: Multiple 3D Models per Chunk

« on: February 05, 2013, 07:41:37 PM »

+2

The ability to do both high quality and low quality versions would be a huge time savings for me as well. For me this would be most useful for a high and low poly mesh, and as well as a high and low resolution texture. The low quality version is useful for 3d previews, such as through as browser. This would be even better as a batch process while having these each saved as different filenames.

45

Feature Requests / Multiple shapes for region selection

« on: February 05, 2013, 03:18:52 AM »

The current region selection tool is a rectangle, can you add an option for different shapes such as a cylinder, sphere, or cone? This could eliminate unnecessary calculations for round objects.