Messages

16

Feature Requests / Re: Selection Toolset -> Add Polygon Tool

« on: October 15, 2024, 11:20:26 PM »

Please Agisoft give us a proper polygon selector. Lasso tool is okay for isolated clusters of points or triangles, but NOT GOOD for fine selection. Add a modifier to the current tool allowing drawing an irregular fence in the same way we draw polygon shapes. clic-clic-clic-clic... tab or doble clic

Please
Please
Please
And also PLEASE USE CURSOR ICONS TO LET USER KNOW WHICH KIND OF TOOL IS ENGAGED.
It's been nearly twenty years loyaly using Photoscan/Metashape and you keep ignoring this simple request, come on!... Almost twenty years blaming myself (and blaming you too) every single day when I do a wrong move of the bounding box, rotate rotate object, or selected something when I just wanted to do a different thing.

Users, please, tell me! Is not the same thing happening to you quite often?

Regards,
Geobit & Accupixel

17

Feature Requests / Re: Selection Toolset -> Add Polygon Tool

« on: October 15, 2024, 11:04:27 PM »

Please Agisoft. Lasso tool is for small isolated clusters, but not for fine selection.

18

General / Re: Custom processing boundary

« on: October 11, 2024, 03:03:24 AM »

Hello, MarijnS:
There is no such a tool for processing only inside of an irregular boundary shape, but theres is a workaround that can do something similar. Besides what Olihar suggests that is to srink the bounding box to a size that encloses only what you need, I must agree with anyone complaining about this method not being very cost-effective in many cases where a box shape is not what we want, but rather is a U or an S or a circle shape.

For example lets say you have aligned a full dataset covering an island with round shape and 5km radius, and now you only want an ultra-high quality model of the coast with only 30 metres width without having to spend days processing the interior. In that case you would love to have a way to workaround. Well, here is one.

Right over the sparse cloud draw a polygon enclosing the area that you want (do not try to be super precise), then right clic on the shape and pick filter photos by shape. Then select all photos remaining on the photos pane and then go to the 'Edit' menu to pick 'Invert Selection' so that everything but the the wanted photos become selected (and turn pink)
then right click on the model viewport and use 'disable images' (and deselect all by selecting nothing with the fence tool in the air)

You are now ready to process just the subset of images that matter for the area you wanted and afterwards you will be allowed to use a proper boundary shapes to either clip outside or inside your deliverables.

I hope it helps you and If you wish really to shorten your learning curve from Pix4Death... just let us know.

José Martínez & ACCUPIXEL
your Metashape therapists ;-)

19

General / Re: Batch Process offers "Point Spacing" for "Build Point Cloud"...

« on: October 09, 2024, 08:28:37 PM »

Dense point cloud can be built straight from depth maps when you follow the old-fashioned workflow. In that case yo have no chance to set the spacing to a given value, but rather it comes out as preset according to the quality chosen your depth maps.
Still you can use tools/point cloud/filter point cloud to resample the cloud afterwards to a given distance

Another way to get a dense cloud is to sample it onto the mesh, and in this modern way you gain the ability to set the desired regular spacing. Choose the mesh as source. The method come with some advantage as well because the dense cloud inherits the consistency of the mesh, and most of the times comes out a lot cleaner and free of disgusting artefacts we often see in old style dense clouds, such as noisy and sky tinted points.

Regards

20

General / Re: Differential scaling

« on: September 30, 2024, 02:26:36 PM »

Hi Paul: Yes this is an intrinsically weak use case. So the way to prevent the strong correlation between interior and exterior params, would be to precalibrate and fix lens calibration. I have worked with a company whose specialty is manhole inspections, and they also had weird issues with fisheyes.
Feel free to contact if you need help for calibration.
Regards


José Martínez

21

General / Re: Differential scaling

« on: September 27, 2024, 01:25:07 AM »

Hi, Paul:
Can you describe how this object has been photographed? It looks like it has been photoscanned through the upper hole, making it difficult to obtain a good cameras structure. How are base lineas aligned with respect to the optical axis? it seems to me that there is a problem with your intrinsic parameters calibration. I've seen cases where the vertical axis (along optical axis) is badly scaled with respect to horizontal (perp to optical axis) and I've found they are linked to a badly estimated focal lengh. My suggestion would be to use the same lens+camera on an object that offers favorable shotting conditions for a good autocalibration and then save interior params to be reused And work on this problematic case as precalibrated or at least the lens calibration params you saved, keyed in as initials before alignment.
I'm curious, what camera and lens combo has been used? do photos come with right focal lenght written on EXIF or are they null and have been guessed by Metashape?
Best regards

José Martínez

22

General / importing E57 scans. I'm lost

« on: September 24, 2024, 04:04:41 PM »

Hi, Agisofties
Why some e57 exported from a terrestria laser scanner turns into an equirectangular depth panorama and sometimes as a set of cube faces, and sometimes there is no image version at all. Is there a way to choose how Metashape reads a scan, and more importantly, is there any reason to consider one format result comes with any particular benefit or is better suited for any workflow.
The following image shows the result of importing three E57 scans, and ech behaves differently even if I use same settings at import dialog.

Best regards

JMR

23

General / Re: Orthomosaik in greyscale

« on: September 06, 2024, 06:40:52 AM »

Metascape takes the output channels from the input with the fewest channels at least for texture and vertex coloring. So you need to disable all single-channel input  (scans and black-and-white panoramas) before building texture or colorize vertices. I'm not totally sure it the same applies also for the orthomosaic... I would just duplicate the chunk and remove any source data with just 1 channel.

Regards,
Geobit

24

Feature Requests / Re: Some suggestions for ergonomic changes

« on: July 16, 2024, 02:47:43 AM »

About decimals. This has to do with windows regional settings for numbers and decimal format. You can modify win to your taste without turning Metashape into a mess.
I personally dislike . as thousand separator and , as decimal point. So every time I'm on a new computer I change thousands to blank and decimal point to a point . which sounds very consistent to me.
Personally, I would prescribe some pills to those who prefer to use comma instead of point, and yes, I would also directly send those who prefer units outside the international system to a mental health institution.
I suspect that more than one proud Englishman privately admits that this exotic system they call imperial is a blot on the normal development of life in the world (even on their own English lives). I don't understand why the hell we have mostly gladly adopted their language to understand each other, and they have never been able to adopt one of the most sound decisions that a sane part of humanity has ever made.
- Delete GCP or not to delete... I could agree it's annoying, it looks like the delete key has a more general scope than our desire sometimes. However, if you use the X button, the action will not kill your GCP but only selected key points, dense points or triangles, ignoring other selected items. If you want you can create a shortcut for the "kind" delete by assigning shift+del to delete just model selection, and it will do the same as the X button on the toolbar.

Loving Photoscan since very early years too.
Regards,

José Martínez
Geobit & Accupixel

25

General / Re: Control strip at lower altitude results in 10m shift

« on: May 21, 2024, 10:13:26 AM »

2. Per image accuracy override the general setting.
3. The error (m) given is an amalgamation of x/y/z, is there a way in Metashape to see the error per dimension?
errors per dimension are shown in the ref pane when you are in errors view mode.
There could be something wrong either in the processing method or in your source references. Otherwise it is hard to explain 10m

26

Feature Requests / Align chunks by laser scans

« on: April 30, 2024, 11:33:49 AM »

I think it would be useful and I'd love to see this added to the methods. If I have two chunks connected by a common laser scan or point cloud, it would be super easy and fast to use it as reference source for transforming one chunk to the other.
Cheers

GEOBIT

27

General / Re: Found oblique cameras without specified capture distance. Continue?

« on: February 17, 2024, 01:12:03 PM »

Hi Costas:
When Metashape finds oblique tilt angles in metadata, it can estimate overlap only when capture distance is entered in reference settings. In previous versions no warning mentioned this.
If object distance is empty, some overlaps would be wrongly estimated. See this drawing to understand.

28

General / Re: No option to create normal maps

« on: February 08, 2024, 12:50:08 PM »

Hi Sleis:
Normal maps are generally intended to attribute complexity to low poly meshes. Apply decimation to your current mesh to produce a lighter copy, and you will get the ability to build a normal map for it based on the high poly mesh.

Regards,
José Martínez CTO
Accupixel Ltd & Geobit Consulting SL
Photogrammetry training

29

General / Re: Import coordinates for laserscans

« on: January 28, 2024, 09:51:05 PM »

Sorry, but the patch does not work at all for me as it should. The reference scan is loaded and nothing changes, the scans continue looking up side down. Am I supposed to do anything to tell the group of scans and the linked images to adopt the transform inherited from the reference scan?

What am I doing wrong?

30

General / Re: Linear scan using video frames and RTK images instead of GCP's

« on: January 28, 2024, 07:40:57 PM »

Is there a way to increase the 'weight' of RTK images in this workflow?
Any advice greatly appreciated!

regards,
Wim

Hi Wim:
Maybe is worth to mention that the weight of camera locations can be set according to the quality of the RTK fix solution.
If your drone with RTK on board can write this tags to the images, then you must tell Metashape to read them from metadata or alternatively you can enter all manually by selecting all cameras on ref pane, right click and choose modify accuracy, then enter the estimated accuracy.
a single value is assigned to xyz
two values sepparated by / are assigned to xy/z
three values are assigned independently to all axis x/y/z
To tell Metashape to gather the values from metadata, goto tools/preferences the got advanced tab and make sure that "Load camera location accuracy from XMP meta data" is enabled.
If it was not enabled for your project, just re-read metadata by means of the button with a camera, (third from the left) to "Import Reference from EXIF"

José Martínez
Accupixel
https://accupixel.co.uk/courses/metashape-professional-edition-for-forensics-surveying/