Messages

1

General / Re: Hardware for Large Scale Projects

« on: April 24, 2024, 11:03:46 PM »

Hi Bzuco,

Thank you for the very useful information.

Just one question out of curiosity, is there a reason why the AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 7995WX (96 Cores | 192 Threads | 5.1GHz Boost) is not a good choice? Is it purely due to the cost of the product?

The price is of course one of the reason, but not the only one.

1. all those 79x5WX threadrippers(16/24/32/64/96 cores variants) have thermal design and ~power limit set to 350W. If you don't touch anything in terms of decreasing power consumption and make CPU more efficient(undervolting processor), then in case 7995WX you will really stuck on base frequency, which is just 2.5GHz...in case all your cores will be utilized.
CPUs have also 3 levels of internal caches which speeds are dependent on CPU core speed. Cache memory bandwidth is lower if core clock is just 2.5GHz than e.g. @4.0GHz... from that reason is better spent those 350W on less cores with higher clock speed.

2. I am not sure if all those 96 cores would be utilized enough, because you will be still limited with RAM memory bandwidth.

3. at the cost of one 96c CPU you can buy two PCs with two GPUs, which will give you more performance.

2

General / Re: Hardware for Large Scale Projects

« on: April 24, 2024, 03:12:02 PM »

@UsmanJam
Intel Xeon are on older manufacturing process, so AMD Threadrippers are slightly better options. I would stay with Ryzen 7950x(16c32t), but yeah, if monney are not problem, then threadrippers another 16 cores are very useful .
Intel i9 24c32t is just (8 performance cores/16t) + 16 efficient slower cores without additional threads, so it is only good choice, if price/performance and performance/watt is better then AMD CPU...so in your case not good options at all.

@Paulo
Here is guide for network processing locally I found on YT. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYRIC-qkZJ8
Also check Metashape PRO PDF manual for the latest command line syntax, in the video is used a little bit older.
For running more instances on one PC just, run node.bat more times  and then you can pause and resume workers in build-in monitor application according your needs at every stage of processing.

3

General / Re: Hardware for Large Scale Projects

« on: April 24, 2024, 12:19:30 PM »

With 180k photos the key will be good utilization of HW. I see the fastest way by using network processing locally on single machine(maybe two).
If you create several local instances of running metashape, you can e.g. greatly speed up phase of detection points from photos, which is important in case of 180000 photos.
These local instances are helping to keep CPU and GPU utilized ~100% all the time without drops.

Instead of buying AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 7995WX you can spend much better money and buy two computers with 32c64t Threadripper 7975WX(higher multicore frequency) and RTX4090.

What will be important during processing is manually assigning the total number of nodes in each processing phase.
For example:
First phase - detecting points needs maybe 10-20 concurently running metashape instances to feed enough one RTX4090...so you enable 10-20 nodes.
After this pahse, matching points is more excesive task for GPU, so you will keep only ~3 nodes active, or maybe few more if you see GPU is not utilized without % drops. More instances would feed too much GPU.
During depth maps generation, which is pure GPU task, maybe two GPUs would be useful.

So my final advise is, buy one computer and if it will be fully utilized locally during network processing, then you can buy exactly another one to half the processing time...if needed. Or you can buy second GPU if you will see, that depth maps gen. is still slow.

It could be beneficial to buy two RTX4080 instead of one 4090, from performance reason, but that is only my assumption.

4

General / Re: Diffuse Texture isn't "seamless" after Photoshop adjustments...?

« on: April 21, 2024, 10:47:19 PM »

Correct. Or you can try Agisoft delighter, or some 3D painting software and its filters(e.g. substance painter).

5

General / Re: Diffuse Texture isn't "seamless" after Photoshop adjustments...?

« on: April 18, 2024, 10:03:53 AM »

It could be caused by lowered texture resolution for viewport(alt+B shortcut - viewport configuration - Viewport Images and Textures Display Resolution).
You can try select polygon on mesh which is in seam area and in unwrap UVW figure out what part on texture it is and in photoshop use eyedropper tool to check both color values on each side of the seam if they match. If not, then Shadows/Highlights is not working equally on the whole image.

6

General / Re: Missing information when adding detail to model

« on: April 14, 2024, 10:05:32 AM »

Hi Charlie, can you share few original close up photos pointing to the green boards? What were your shooting/aligning/mesh building parameters?
Those green boards are solid colors and maybe even the dust on them will be not enough to create some good features for building good depth maps.

7

General / Re: 3D model & camera path from video - how to 3D composite in After Effects?

« on: December 31, 2023, 02:53:23 PM »

Hi, you can try search in these tutorials for compositing / camera tracking / match moving ...  https://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials/
Or you can try some trial apps like Boujou, SynthEyes, ... you should be able to save camera path and import it as camera animation in Cinema, blender, ...

8

General / Re: Scan inside and outside a house?

« on: November 16, 2023, 11:30:21 AM »

For interiors it is good to have good camera, where you can safely increase ISO to 800-1600 if you do not want to use tripod...so full frame DSLR ~18-20Mpix... more Mpix will cause more noise.
You can put some markers on walls which are painted with just color and have no other features.
Cover glass panels/mirrors.
If you can keep the doors open, it helps you grab more feature points on photos from rooms you see through the open doors.
Interiors are overall harder to shoot because not so much space, plenty of furniture, not good lighting etc.

9

General / Re: Managing huge project : HELP !

« on: November 16, 2023, 11:11:13 AM »

If Metashape does not have build-in feature to resume work after crash/power off then you can't.
With that suspend to disk function you can at least eliminate problem caused by not using ECC memory modules...put PC to sleep mode for few minutes after each ~18-24h of work.

Can you manually split project on smaller pieces and then merge dense pointclouds together?

10

General / Re: Metashape Pro Crashing During Image Alignment

« on: November 16, 2023, 11:03:41 AM »

@colbyrand  Check also your NVMe SSDs at least with some SMART monitoring tools if there are no errors reported or warnings. SSDs are also just memory modules. There could be problem when Metashape is saving temporary files during estimating camera locations phase....you never know.

11

General / Re: Managing huge project : HELP !

« on: November 15, 2023, 01:15:56 PM »

To avoid crashes your mac should use memory modules with ECC(Error correction code), because without this after few days some error could appear in RAM modules.
If you do not have option to use ECC memory modules and want to avoid power outages(storms) you can once per day or before incomming storm put your mac into sleep mode(suspend RAM content to disk).
In this case all RAM content is saved to disk and PC is completely power OFF.
After turning it back ON, RAM content is loaded from disk and your work will continue automatically where you left it.
There are two options, suspend to RAM and suspend to disk. They can be set in computer BIOS.

12

General / Re: Strange test results on different GPU

« on: October 19, 2023, 11:12:36 AM »

@DayGeckoArt
It is mostly FP and thanks to double FP units since RTX 3000, RTX 4060 could achieves the same performance as 2080 ti. It has slightly higher single precision performance, but much weaker memory bandwidth(272 vs. 616)...so if L2 cache does not help, it could be even slower...worth to test  .

13

General / Re: Aligning photos I9 cpu used only at 10-15%

« on: October 17, 2023, 09:27:55 PM »

Hi Dukytony, matching points stage is accelerated by GPU, so CPU usage is OK in your case.

14

General / Re: How to tell if the GPU is being used

« on: October 17, 2023, 09:25:53 PM »

@HMArnold
On matching points phase you should see great GPU utilization, but it depends on settings(key points limit and if you are using generic preselection).
Extracting points is greatly used by GPU, but the problem is, decoding image data is single threaded on CPU side, so not enough data even for weak GPU 
For monitoring you can use small GPU-Z utility(GPU Load column).

15

General / Re: Help Computer Specs upgrading

« on: July 31, 2023, 02:31:56 PM »

Mac Studio has advantage only on CPU tasks...thanks to almost 4x higher memory bandwidth. But if custom PC has more CPU cores, the Mac advantage is gone.
Custom PC build will always better fits your needs at the same amount of money.

Can you post detailed metashape alignment settings? And how big your photos are and what kind of project it is?