Messages

121

General / Re: Align taking exponentially longer w/ more tracks added...

« on: August 21, 2021, 04:54:08 PM »

I guess my erratic 'flight' (swim) paths are causing far too much overlap.  And stretching out processing time towards infinity...

So does the following sound like a reasonable plan?

If i start with flight 1, align it all, check it, and then do a reduce overlap.  Remove those disabled cameras, and save as "Flight 1's optimum cameras"
I've had problems with double skins when keeping points (set in prefs) and adding additional flights, so I'll delete the alignment.
Add flight 2's cameras and do a fresh align with 1's reduce cameras and all of 2's...  Then check, reduce, remove and save as "Flight 1+2's optimum cameras"
Repeat for every flight...

This will then only add one flight's worth of cameras that overlap too much, adding to an otherwise 'optimised' set of cameras.

I'd like to resume just adding flight to the kept points, so do you have any pointers to how to prevent double-skins?  I can't work it out.
And tips on the 'optimum' number to set when Reducing Overlap would be nice... There's no information on this value anywhere.

122

General / Re: Reset View Question

« on: August 21, 2021, 03:19:30 PM »

Hello PROBERT1968,

Do you have a camera animation track in the active chunk?

Ahhhhhh!!!
This has been bugging me for months!!!

When i press 1, 3, or 0, my model has been jumping off the screen, and i've never worked out how to center the views.

Could Metashape be made to center the views on the extents of the model/mesh/points, rather than things like camera tracks???  And 1 and 3 giving me front and side views in a similar ways, without it disappearing.

It doesn't look good when you're showing people the models and it keeps getting lost off screen! 

I'd like to just reset view (0) and it jump back to the default top down view, with the model filling 90% of the horizontal and vertical size of the display port...  That'd be more 'normal' i think.

123

General / Re: Camera Groups? for multi-camera & multi-mission?

« on: July 19, 2021, 03:07:17 AM »

Gotcha, thanks.

I'll leave them alone.

124

General / Re: Align taking exponentially longer w/ more tracks added...

« on: July 19, 2021, 03:04:41 AM »

I have logging turned on now, for the redo i'm running, as the last run came back with lots of errors, double surfaces...  Even tho it was i think it was with the same default settings as the run previous version that gave an excellent result.

This time i'm running it low, 20k, 2k, instead of the normal high, 40k, 4k...

I've done a fair big of testing with different settings, but it doesn't seem to change much...  Basically, when it gets to Selecting Pairs, it takes the same enormous amount of time, no matter the settings.

When it competes, i'll attatch it.

But in the mean time, could you describe the processes, stages that MS goes through when it aligns?  And what things affect, help, hinder the align times?

125

General / Re: Align taking exponentially longer w/ more tracks added...

« on: July 18, 2021, 05:45:17 PM »

The main point of this post was to inquire why the Align time gets exponentially longer.
I'm adding 20% more camers and it's taking 50% longer.

All other operations seem to scale linearly.  Meshing is fairly quick.

When it gets to "Selecting Pairs", and the next stage, it grinds to a halt, taking 1400 seconds per cycle.

Alexey, can you give us any insight into what MS actually does during the various stages of Align Cameras?

126

General / Re: Align taking exponentially longer w/ more tracks added...

« on: July 18, 2021, 05:33:50 PM »

...Just change the computer.

I so, so wish i had some funds to do so!!! 

It was a decent spec workstation laptop 3 years ago... Damn you Mr Moore!

Send me any spare ones you have if you can? 

127

General / Re: Align taking exponentially longer w/ more tracks added...

« on: July 17, 2021, 07:44:47 PM »

The lastest run took 3 days, 8 hours to align 18,000...  80 hours!!!

The mesh only took about 12, after a bit of gradual selection tasks and reduce overlap to 8.

Sadly, after creating the mesh, i've noticed that there's several areas where the's two 'layers' of mesh, where a surface hasn't aligned from different tracks...  This didn't happen on the previous run with 15,000, it was very well aligned... and i'm sure that the settings were the same (high, GP, 40,000, 4,000)... so i'm a bit frustrated by that.  Gonna have to redo it... 

The only setting that i can think of that may have changed, is "Adaptive camera model fitting"...  It's off for the latest run for sure...  Should this be on for my type of scans?

Cheers.

128

General / Re: Camera Groups? for multi-camera & multi-mission?

« on: July 17, 2021, 06:16:32 PM »

Gotcha.
I'm swimming along with my 2 GoPros, so i'm basically a human drone.

I'll spit the missions (pairs of camera tracks) into folders just for ease managing them then.

My two GoPros do not match (sadly)... they're a 7 and an 8.  Tho they're almost identical sensor/lens wise i think...  These automatically appear as two calibrations groups... Which i haven't touched...  I assume i don't need to?

Would using two identical camera models make any meaningful difference to MS's dealing with my two camera rig's tracks?

Cheers.

129

Feature Requests / Re: UI: Show 'enabled' for Cameras: "69/123 enabled"

« on: July 16, 2021, 01:39:39 PM »

Hello,

If you are using version 1.7.3, have you checked, if Enabled column in the Photos pane (in Detailed view mode) is what you need to select only enabled/disabled cameras?

Oooh, that's perfect!
This makes removing all the disabled cameras easy as.


But for my original post, could we also have the "(69/123 enabled)" info showing, like you've given us for the alignment numbers?

130

General / Camera Groups? for multi-camera & multi-mission?

« on: July 16, 2021, 01:17:09 PM »

Does separating cameras into groups change the resulting alignment in MS?

I have a multi-camera rig for underwater reef scanning. Two GoPros on a 3m pole.  Pointing down/normal to the reef/slope/rock, they're unsynchronised but are both taking time-lapse photos at 2s intervals.  So i get a track with two lines of cameras.  With lots of overlap going forward, and good overlap to the side.

Should these photos be put into one Camera Group, or two?


I also have done many missions/dive/scans, over several days.

Should these missions be in separate camera groups too?


Does MS change how it aligns the photos if they're in Camera Groups?

131

Bug Reports / Re: Processed thumbnails load too slowly

« on: July 06, 2021, 02:28:12 PM »

I might be wildly wrong... But is this what's causing my 15+ minutes of 100% CPU when i load my big model???
It has 15,000 12MP GoPro photos...
Though Photos is not turned on in the GUI.  Only console & workspace.

132

Feature Requests / Re: UI: Show 'enabled' for Cameras: "69/123 enabled"

« on: July 06, 2021, 07:41:15 AM »

+1

(And it'd be nice if this could be a column in the details view of the photos pane too, so it can be used for sorting, so you can easily select from or filter on only the enabled or disabled cameras.)

Oooh, yes!

I desperately need a way of selecting these not aligned, and disabled cameras!!

133

Feature Requests / Re: Build Depth Maps as separate Job? (or at least save after creating them)

« on: July 06, 2021, 07:39:22 AM »

Hi,

there are already a few similar threads on this matter:
https://www.agisoft.com/forum/index.php?topic=11785
https://www.agisoft.com/forum/index.php?topic=12224

I think that at some point the possibility to generate depth maps only will be added to GUI, however, now there's no exact timeframe for such functionality.

Sweet.
Thanks Alexey.

134

Feature Requests / Re: Build Depth Maps as separate Job? (or at least save after creating them)

« on: July 06, 2021, 07:38:43 AM »

They are saved to the Disk FYI, the project files just don't get updated. If you get a crash you can bring it back by editing the .xml files. That being said, there should be a save substep in Build Model/Cloud etc to avoid that.

That's handy to know!

135

General / Re: Align taking exponentially longer w/ more tracks added...

« on: July 04, 2021, 02:40:18 PM »

I've been trialling High, Medium and Low, but they don't seem to change the crazy long "Selecting Pairs" times...
I actually set the current run to low / 20,000 / 2,000...  I'm hoping it shortens the other steps of the align.

Yeah, i realise that this is quite a 'big' project...
Though i do think I've probably mapped 2/3, 3/4 of the area i 'need' to...  With further mapping being a plus...
For fun, here's a 4k animation of it so far:
https://youtu.be/BnSGENSdtmM

And obviously, that problem is exaggerated by my lowly ThinkPad P51 with its crappy old Quadro 2200M...

But i wasn't expecting the times to grow exponentially!

Alexey, can you shed any light on the Aligning process and the experiences i'm having?

Cheers.