Messages

16

General / Re: New marketplace for your 3D scans {SnapTank}

« on: April 19, 2016, 04:12:43 PM »

Hi Ross,
Nice initiative !
However I still find that the the royalties are too high, especially when you compare to what you can expect with gumroad.
I have looked at your website, that works well, except that the preview images suffer from a lack of resolution when entering in zoom mode (with mouse flying over the image), making the function useless.
I may try it in the near future, but I have first to change the face of my life models to respect their privacy.
Regards
Fred

17

General / Re: Extreme distortion of the sparse cloud using masks?

« on: April 19, 2016, 03:43:09 PM »

Hi Jerry,
It would be nice to have a picture of the statue to confirm my words but I suspect that the statue is shinny or specular. In this case, the camera alignement has been made properly due to the environment points.
When you have restricted the matching points to the statue with your masks, there where not enough matching or many wrong matching resulting in bad camera alignment.
In your specific case, I think it is preferable to keep the environment for alignment, or limit the masked area to unfocused areas, such as out of DOF, or changed areas such as people moving around.
Good luck and send screenshot of you final model

18

General / Re: new to agisoft, turntable workflow?

« on: April 15, 2016, 02:53:13 PM »

Turntable works fine for me!
See below examples made with one camera and one flash unit:
https://skfb.ly/Gr9S
https://skfb.ly/FGWE
(both are not raw models and have been manually retopologised and cleaned)
Looking at your screen capture, it seems that the lighting is not consistent between pictures. Some are very bright, others are darker.
My flash unit is placed behind the camera and the light directed to the background and roof which are both white. This way I have soft lighting on the face of the object I am shooting. The camera shall be in manual mode to have consistent pictures.
It is hard to see on the screen capture, but it seems that your object surface does not have a lot of details except for the overall shape and is very shiny. As Alexey says, photogrammetry is not compatible with reflective objects, try polarised filter to reduce specularity.
In addition, try not having the full object in each photo, but make turns on the top, the middle and the bottom or even more, each time with at least 30% overlapping.
The advantage of having an object and not a life model, it that you can have as many pictures as you want 
Good luck
Fred

19

Face and Body Scanning / Re: Synchronization of 80 pcs DSLR CANON 600D

« on: April 15, 2016, 12:54:50 PM »

your not very clear on your setup so it is hard to help you (radio vs cable, what pc control program)
however if you use the 600D jack connector for the remote control, you definitly need a stereo jack as both focus and shoot functions must be switched at the same time to trigger the camera.

20

Bug Reports / Re: Mesh exported from Zbrush is imported in a different position from the original

« on: March 04, 2016, 03:07:15 PM »

what version of zbrush are you using?
in 4R6 it occurs all the time and the trick that sometime work what to import mesh, reset scale and position, re-import it into the same subtool and should be good
however sometimes the scale is not adapted to ZB tools and you finish having a very small tool even with the larger size
it seems to be fixed in 4R7

21

General / Re: Any idea why my mesh looks so terrible? It has 300+ pictures...

« on: March 04, 2016, 01:49:38 PM »

You can export the model in your favorite 3D software, modify it, remesh it or completely reduild it to have sharp edges.
Unwrap the UV with no overlap.
Re-import it into photoscan and generate the texture with the option 'keep UV'
and voilà !

During the process be sure to not change the position and scale of the model.

22

Face and Body Scanning / Re: Building a face scanner for research purposes

« on: March 04, 2016, 01:37:28 PM »

Same cable length will not help for latency as the delay will be about 45 nano second for 100m cable.
Even with a large rig, you will have only few nano seconds delays.
These delays are nothing compared to the camera responses time which are on the millisecond order (x1000).
As far as I know, good sync is not not to be expected from camera triggering but from light !
Good luck

23

Face and Body Scanning / Re: USB issue about multi camera array on INTEL platform

« on: December 15, 2015, 09:17:50 PM »

From my experience, the max quantity of cams that you can connect to a computer is very variable.
I did not found any documentation and everybody using multiple cam array are keeping their configuration secret.
You have to try by yourself. There is no logic rule. Sometimes an old computer can take more cams than a new an powerfull one.
On its website, Infinite is claiming to have only two computers for 150 DSLR ! Maybe extension cards.
I have ended-up by using Intel NUC I5 and only 12 DSLR can be connected to each NUC.
Good luck

24

Face and Body Scanning / Re: camera stand hardware

« on: November 20, 2015, 12:42:53 PM »

it seams nice!
can you show results?

25

Face and Body Scanning / Re: Texture not aligning

« on: November 20, 2015, 12:40:00 PM »

you need to create UV coordinate for your model.
it can be done in photoscan when building the texture: the dropdown menu 'mapping mode' has several options (generic, orthophoto, ...).
each method will assign the model a different type of uv coordinate and the associated texture. the problem is that the generated textures can not be easily modified.
better option is to use zbrush which have a powerfull tool called UV Master.
but to do that you need to dramatically decimate you model (100k-200k max) and create polygroups to control the parts remaining together and optimise the area used in you image.
once you have UV coordinate on your model, you can import it back in photoscan an use the option 'keep uv' when building the texture.
I recommend you search for tutorials on these subjects (decimation, projection, uvmaster).

whatever the technique, zbrush is handling textures differently than other 3d software: V coordinate is inverted
in zbrush: import a texture and then click on the flipV button
outside zbrush: apply a vertical symmetry of your image with your preferred software

good luck !

26

Face and Body Scanning / Re: aligning face and body chunk

« on: November 17, 2015, 04:41:12 PM »

When you use the align chunk function, the 'master' chunk is the active one before you use the function.
The active chunk is shown in bold in the workspace and in the align chunks window.

27

Face and Body Scanning / Re: Hollow 3D Figurine for color 660 pro

« on: November 01, 2015, 03:26:52 PM »

you can easily do it in zbrush:

if your model is already having vertex coloring:
-make sure texture is not active
-use you favorite tool to paint with RGB active and ZADD or ZSUB inactive
-(optional) create new texture from polypaint

if your model is having texture and with or without vertex coloring:
-create polypaint from texture
-make sure texture is not active
-use you favorite tool to paint with RGB active and ZADD or ZSUB inactive
-(optional) create new texture from polypaint

28

Face and Body Scanning / Re: Greetings from a new user! Need some advice on proper camera alignment.

« on: November 01, 2015, 03:15:54 PM »

Maybe you should try with a turning chair instead of turning around you subject.
Because you have only 3 lights, the back may be under-exposed and the matching fails.
To have better camera alignments you can also try this:
-load pictures
-lunch align process
-keep few cameras pointing on the same area and reset the alignment of the others
-re-align these cameras one by one

one you have all camera aligned (or almost), you can produce a low or medium resolution cloud, clean it, build the mesh and generate mask from this model. then you restart the align process by enabling the mask feature and you should get better alignment. generate the cloud (with or without mask depending on the mask quality), clean it from disperse points and optimize the camera.

Anyway, scanning a face or body with only 1 cam is challenging and don't expect to have perfect results.
Good luck

29

Face and Body Scanning / Re: camera stand hardware

« on: October 28, 2015, 01:06:14 PM »

You can use Manfrotto autopoles http://www.manfrotto.com/products/lighting/studio-equipment/auto-poles

30

Face and Body Scanning / Re: body with 1 cam

« on: October 04, 2015, 03:49:13 PM »

if your model is sitting or laying you can have quite good results with only 1 camera
even if not complete to protect model's modesty, one of my first try worked fine with 41 photo (https://skfb.ly/CUCN)
of course you need to rework on zbrush but even with a 100 camera rig you do not have perfect raw scan