Messages

61

General / Re: Is there a way to put mask from sparse point cloud to image?

« on: October 21, 2020, 01:13:22 PM »

Hello, Phoggi:
It is not possible to build a cloud with two different qualities in one step.
What you can do is build first the low quality dense cloud for the whole and then build a mask to isolate the part that you want to process with high quality. You can have the two dense clouds separated in the same  chunk, or in the case that you want to have both clouds merged, you can do as follows:
1. create low quality dense cloud and after all, duplicate chunk (including dense cloud)
2. in the copy draw a polygon around area of interest and use select points by shape, crop and create a mesh from remaining points.
3. import mask from model
4. build HQ dense of selected area.
5. group all photos in copy chunk (in case you want to remove duplicated photos in next step)
5. merge chunks with dense clouds (and then remove the grouped photos from the merged chunk)

Regards
José Martínez
GEOBIT CONSULTING SL CTO.
ACCUPIXEL LTD. co-founder.

62

General / Re: Is there a way to put mask from sparse point cloud to image?

« on: October 13, 2020, 07:41:05 PM »

Yes.
1. Build a rough mesh on the sparse cloud using highest triangle count or even better, a custom quality number with 2x the number of tie points. (consider using height field mode if your project allows it)
2. Select your area of interest on the triangle mesh and use crop button to keep only the selected triangles.
3. File import masks from model. (to all photos, to a selection of photos or to the entire workspace)

As long as triangles on tie points are going to be large and uneven, your selection and therefore your mask, will have borders like a saw. If you want them to have cleaner boundaries you can build a low quality dense cloud, then use a polygon to select dense points inside, then crop. Next is to build a mesh based on the remaining dense points (extrapolation disabled) and again use mask import form model.

I hope this workflow works for you.
Best regards

José Martínez
GEOBIT CONSULTING SL CTO.
ACCUPIXEL LTD. co-founder.

63

General / Re: Exported obj not proportional

« on: October 01, 2020, 10:05:22 PM »

I can't say, what could be the source of your problem. Actually your networks looks pretfy robust, and the only thing I can say it could serve to improve it is to mix some ring with camera rotated  in portrait (as opposed to landscape).
Also I would ask what camera/lens combo and what focus setting were used.
Regards

64

General / Re: Exported obj not proportional

« on: October 01, 2020, 01:43:01 AM »

can you post a creencapture of the model view with photos turned ON ? I'd like to see cameras distribution and relative orientation.
Metashape Standard shoul not be considered a metrology tool. Even if it uses same algorithms as Pro, the lack of instruments for creating geometric constraints like scale bars and control points, leads or can lead to deformed models.
These constraints play a fundamental role not only for determining the external orientation of the model (scale, rotations and position) but also in the relative and interior orientation, and therefore in the shape and proportion.
Metashape Standard can deliver accurate models, but the lack of control makes it umpredictable. Accuracy will be conditioned by too many factors and the actual shape of the object is one of them.

65

General / Re: Obtaining a Camera Calibration

« on: September 30, 2020, 07:18:11 PM »

Hi Dave:
These are not lens parameters or corrections, but reference data. And definitively they should not be used in a different project in any case.
If you want to export for re-use lens corrections, you need to export camera parameters from the camera calibration dialog.
Importing lens calibration that came out of a different project could make some sense with a P4P because its camera apparently (according to some papers I have read) is reasonably stable.
But for those parameters to be accurate and valuable for future cases, your source project needs to be very well constrained, which is not always the case with drones without an accurate camera geotagging system. It will depend on the ground texture, overlap, block geometry, etc. It is a complex question, Dave.
Calibrating by means of the Metashape's built-in checkerboard calibration feature is not a real alternative for drone cameras. It is intended for close range, unless you had a screen of the size of a football yard.
Best regards

66

General / Re: Selection Mode

« on: September 29, 2020, 11:07:50 AM »

Selection can be negative, so if you want to deseselect something behind the wanted part, just tilt the model so it shows the unwanted selection apart from the wanted one, and use the preferred tool with the shift key pressed.
Hiding parts behind in advance by filtering, as James pointed out, sometimes takes longer and adds unnecessary operations in cases when a simple deselection is easy.
Regards,
GEOBIT

67

General / Re: Obtaining a Camera Calibration

« on: September 29, 2020, 11:01:00 AM »

Hi, Dave
Same drone means nothing I guess you mean same camera.
But how a camera can be the very same? the only case one can say so, it is when we are using metric cameras with lockable or nonexistent focusing mechanism, etc.
Using fixed (pre-calibrated) lens parameters does not necessarily come with better global accuracy unless camera positions are of high quality (few cm accurate).
That said, yes. It can be done. Export your parameters from the camera calibration dialogue while you are seeing the adjusted tab.
with the new uncontrolled project, before alignmente go to same dialog, import the camera calibration file, and set mode to pre-calibrated. (Also you can choose which parameters you want to set as fixed)... then align.
Regards,
GEOBIT

68

General / Re: Intelligent paint... is it of any use for you?

« on: September 22, 2020, 12:09:51 PM »

I'm starting to think that I'm not alone... so no one has ever made use of the intelligent paint successfully?

69

General / Intelligent paint... is it of any use for you?

« on: September 19, 2020, 01:06:43 PM »

I've been using Photoscan and Metashape for ages, but I still cant figure out how this tool has been with us for so long. Sorry but I can't make it workable at all. Can anyone post a good example of its use that can justify why we do have such a long-standing tool, but we can't have instead a simple but effective user-sizeable circular brush.
Why this intelligent paint does not even reset when one hits esc to try again? what am I completely missing?

Thanks

70

General / Re: Use PPP corrected positions to overwrite image positions

« on: September 19, 2020, 12:52:33 PM »

As Paulo says, name with extension must be identical, and notice the import is case-sensitive as well!
Regards

71

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

« on: September 19, 2020, 12:43:52 PM »

Lasso tool is fast but is totally useless and irritating for precise selection. Please Agisoft, listen to your users, add a proper polygon selection tool and let it behave as lasso when combined with some key.
GEOBIT.

72

General / Re: RTK and PPK with P4RTK for mapping

« on: September 16, 2020, 10:26:13 AM »

Are you using pre-calibrated camera? are the photos strictly nadir only? I've found that Metashape (as did Photoscan) is not as robust as it could be at aligning cameras with direct reference (PPK/RTK) in non-calibrated case. I have reported this a few times but nothing seems to have changed.
calibrate your phantom with a very well controlled (plenty of GCP) test field and save your params for future use as fixed or semi-fixed and see if it improves your result. It looks like ground elevation and focal lenght are hard to be estimated at the same time in projects with nadir photos only. thus some vertical offset is to be expected whtn no ground control point is invited to the party.
BTW, sadly, I've found that a competitor, does it a bit better.
Regards.

73

Feature Requests / Invert tilt movement in terrain mouse mode

« on: September 07, 2020, 09:38:16 PM »

I have requested it some time ago and complained about the weird mouse behavior in Terrain mode.
You argued that in the current way it was more consistent with other applications in the market... I then wondered which ones.
At the end I never use this mode because it hurts my brain so much.
But now that Agisoft Cloud uses the mouse movement in the right way. Therefore I beg you to be consequent and change it in Metashape Professiona to work as it does in Cloud. If not, at least please, add a tweak for letting users to invert terrain tilt direction to match Agisoft Cloud.
Best regards, and congrats for the nice website design.
GEOBIT

74

General / Re: Number of Keypoints

« on: August 31, 2020, 02:49:31 PM »

Yes. you can dig into project folder structure and find a file called doc.xml inside of the latest point.cloud folder located in project.files/0/0
There is a slight problem that it is to identify image_id with its label or file name. You need to open another one, equally called doc.xml packed inside the chunk.zip folder, located in project.files/0/

There must be a simpler way by means of python console, but I can't help with that.
Best
GEOBIT

75

General / Re: Extracting camera trigger times

« on: August 25, 2020, 10:16:20 PM »

If time stamps have been written to photo exif by some on-purpose hardware solution (like in a Phantom 4RTK) then you can get up to millisecond time resolution and likely you can batch export them with exiftool. But if you just pretend to use the standard time stamp of your camera for precisely calculate camera location... I'm afraid you are not in the right way. Time tag is written with one second resolution in most cameras. If the camera is moving at 5m/s (quite a normal speed for a drone), your interpolation in camera path will lead to higher uncertainty than your gps.
Most systems created for getting high precision geotags, write time-stamps of shot events into a log file, not in the photo metadata. I guess this is the file you need.
Regards