Messages

16

Bug Reports / Re: 1.7.1 fails to build depth maps with same amount of VRAM as 1.6.5

« on: September 24, 2021, 12:16:03 AM »

I was having the same issue with 1.7.3. With a GPU card with 2GB memory (Quadro K620), sometimes a sizeable proportion of the memory would report as unavailable midway through processing, causing a fallback to CPU processing. My workaround was to go back to using 1.6.6 which didn't show have the problem. Unfortunately, once 1.7.3 has modified a project file, 1.6.6 can have trouble reading it.

17

Bug Reports / 1.7.4 Holes in mesh

« on: September 23, 2021, 11:58:18 PM »

Using 1.74 (12950, 13028) with the highest quality settings, and highest quality alignment, I'm getting very wierd behaviour regarding holes.

Previously, where there were gaps in the data (such as a shiny featureless patch on an object, or the upper surface of a window-sill that was not directly visible from the ground), the software would either leave a gap in the surface, or patch over the gap by extrapolating from the surrounding surface. If it left a gap, then this could be simply fixed using Metashape's "fill holes" feature (or the equivalents on other software).

Now, the software interprets any gaps in the data as actual physical holes leading directly into the object, that it attempts to reproduce by creating curved-mouthed tunnels (one for each data-gap) that dive into the object's interior. When there are a number of these tunnels, the software then makes the inner mouths of these tunnels flare open again on the inside and link up to produce a new (invented!) interior surface, at a roughly constant depth from the outer surface.

I'm trying to model some solid stone statues standing on plinths, which have simple, singly-connected surfaces, and the models are turning into partially hollowed-out shells with lots of "wormholes" connecting the outer and inner sets of surfaces together. Lots of extravagant unwanted artificial interior structure that shouldn't be there, doesn't correspond to anything photographed, and which has to be carefully removed before the holes can be filled-in conventionally.

Is there any way to switch this new "clever" behaviour off, and revert to the older way of dealing with gaps?
 

18

General / Re: how to set vertical orientation manually ?

« on: December 07, 2020, 02:07:10 AM »

You know that once you've aligned the model with the grid, you can jump between different standard views (with respect to the grid) using the keypad?

19

General / Re: Is using a multi cpu workstation worth it ?

« on: December 07, 2020, 02:03:35 AM »

Hi cyrilp! I guess it depends on where your current processing bottlenecks are, and that's something that other people aren't likely to know, because it depends on the sorts of projects you're doing, your personal workflow, and what your priorities are for settings.

Some people will spend a lot of time revisiting and redoing a stage that is mostly GPU-intensive ... others may spend a lot of time tweaking a stage that's CPU-intensive. I guess it depends on which sort of calculation stage you find most annoying! 

20

Feature Requests / "Protect region" tool?

« on: December 07, 2020, 01:49:58 AM »

... the idea of this would be to have an additional tool that works almost identically to the "select region" tool, but the "selected" points aren't selected for editing ... instead they change colour (to a different colour to "selected for edit" points and can't be selected for editing (until you alter the protect region).

The nice thing about having a protected block is that if you protected a building or a piece of ground, you could then delete a street sign without deleting the building behind it, or look down on the scene and delete the street sign from above without deleting the pavement beneath it.

Programmatically, the new tool would be a copy of the "select" tool, except that it works with a different point-set, and that in case of a point trying to appear in both sets, "protect" overrides "select".

21

Feature Requests / Re: Custom metadata for chunks

« on: December 01, 2020, 11:04:19 PM »

Yep, I think that all serious media file formats ought to support the basic metadata fields (author, company, description, keywords, title, preview thumbnail etc.).

It would also be really really useful to have a free-text "notes" area where we could save project details, notes and status, for future reference.

Having optional metadata stored per chunk would be even better. 

The only problem I can see with with having more than one set of metadata per file is that if you are also exposing that metadata in a standard format so that the operating system's file manager can read it, and the file manager lets you find or sort files by standard metadata info, or display thumbnails in a folder window, then I don't know how Windows, Macs, Linux might respond to finding multiple metadata sets in a single file. Maybe they might only read the first one.

Ahhh... got it! I you want to save multiple sets of info for different chunks, we have Agisoft duplicate the first set of metadata into the file header, and if you want something else in the file header, you create a separate empty chunk at the top of the list, for holding the global file metadata and notes! Ha!

22

Feature Requests / Align/realign bounding box

« on: December 01, 2020, 09:27:57 PM »

At the moment when we create a sparse cloud, the orientation is (obviously) random, and if we want the model aligned with a grid we have to tweak it around a bit. Fair enough.

But then we have to do exactly the same realignment with the bounding box. There are very few situations in which you would want the bounding box NOT aligned with the grid, so it would be nice if there was a way to snap the box alignment to the grid alignment, or to ask for the box alignment to be recalculated in the context of for the given grid alignment. 

It'd reduce the number of fiddly manual 3D alignments from two to one.

23

Feature Requests / Hide Backfaces ("Dollhouse View")

« on: December 01, 2020, 09:18:04 PM »

The ability to hide backfaces (="Dollhouse View") is really important for modelling interiors.

Suppose that you want to produce a public-facing diagram of the layout of rooms and passages and steps (etc.) in an old theatre, or the layout of the interior spaces in an art gallery or a floor of a stately home (or a network of underground access tunnels).
You'll want to use a view "looking down" on the network of rooms/corridors/tunnels from above and outside, in which case everything that you want to show will be obscured by ceilings and obstructing walls.
There needs to be an option to make all the unwanted backfaces automatically invisible.

I've been doing some interiors, and it's a giant pain to have to make a copy of the model and manually cut away all the obstructing detail, only for someone to suggest another view, so you have to go back to the original model and start cutting away stuff again.

This should be automatic. The software is already recognising all the facets that point away from the observer and dealing with those facets differently for display (displaying them darker), all we'd need is a toggle option to just not show them.

I was rather tempted to create a short rotating video of the layout of an interior space, but no way am I going to create two hundred versions of the same model with different parts cut away for every frame!   

24

Feature Requests / Re: Selecting regions to be used for alignment between chunks

« on: December 01, 2020, 08:12:12 PM »

yep

25

Feature Requests / Re: Feature Request : Copy Cameras

« on: December 01, 2020, 08:07:41 PM »

Yes please!
It's kinda annoying that "move camera" exists, but "copy camera" doesn't seem to.