I have models where a few images just refuse to align. Even though looking at the photos before/after/around them, there's definitely some usable overlap...
This may be due to various reason. For me, scanning underwater, if i'm scanning shallow reef/rocks on a sunny day, the light rays dancing around completely change the colours of the bottom, and confuse the heck out of MS. Or if surge has moved me faster over a shallow area, lowering the overlaps for a couple of photos...
Could we have a feature that can use a combination of approaches to brute-force the alignments of selected unaligned photos with selected photos that are aligned... I.e. 'these photos definitely overlap'. MS could then use all its tricks to find tie points. Say, using very high to very low quality settings, or some novel ways of finding the matches.
For the normal alignment process, doing this would likely send processing time exponential, but for fixing a few problematic non aligned photos, it simply wouldn't matter if it took 10x, 100x longer per alignment. I'd happily spend/wait 5 minutes if i end up with them aligning.
I've attached two photos from one of my problematic areas, the top of a big boulder that's a bit shallow, 5m deep, and the sun rays were dancing around on it. They are from a sequentially taken, time-lapse set, where 10 photos over the top of the rocks fail to align... There's good alignment of the photos before and after them, and to the side of them. The 1st photo is as the end of the aligned photos, the next photo is the unaligned one... there are then 9 more unaligned, before we get back to where they start aligning again.
As you can see... these two photos have got huge amounts of alignment! But i assume the sun rays mess it up. But these two should definitely be able to be aligned by force, surely???
And yes, in the Pro version, there's markers... But these are not available for us mere Standard users.
The manual markers method would also take way, way longer most of the time too!
We just want to tell MS that "These photos are all of the same area and overlap somewhat... Please just align them however you can?"
It sucks having a hole in a model, just because you might have forgotten one of the photos, or it's blurred, or it was sunny...
Thanks.
Topic: Brute-force alignment of the unaligned in MS Std. (Read 1763 times)
