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Author Topic: Community submitted workflows sub-forum  (Read 1712 times)

CheeseAndJamSandwich

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Community submitted workflows sub-forum
« on: October 28, 2021, 05:48:01 PM »
Could we have another sub-forum created for us users to submit our own workflows?  For sharing, critique, optimising, etc.

Metashape was absolutely one of the easiest pieces of software to step through and immediately get results out of, on the first use!  I just followed the first four items on the workflow menu, working on a small set of test photos, and finished up with a fully textured 3D model!  It was truly amazing!
But, when you need to use it in anger, for real projects, proper work, then you have to know the nitty-gritty details, and all the many other features MS has...  The learning curve then gets a lot steeper!

One of the best resources available, and discussed by many of us users, is the USGS' amazingly detailed Metashape workflow documentation.  The knowledge/understanding of MS that it's given me is huge!
The newer version is found here:
https://pubs.er.usgs.gov/publication/ofr20211039

But this is just one workflow for a fairly specific use case.  The users Metashape here have the full range of use cases, and the workflows they need to use are going to be quite varied, for various reasons.
So it'd be lovely if some of us could share how we're using Metashape, why we've chosen the settings we use, what problems we might of encountered along the way and how we got around them, and also areas where we're not sure on what is the best settings, approach for certain parts.  Everyone will have different levels of expertise and experience with the many facets of Metashape, so they may be able to suggest changes. Or others can ask why something was done a certain way.  Having feedback from the userbase, the community will only make all our workflows flow that bit better!  So we get more, better, quicker work done, new users will be able to get up to speed even quicker, and Agisoft will sell more copies.

We could post our own workflows, including as much of the the following, and more, as possible:
  • Descriptive Title, that includes type, like drone, UW, DEM, turntable, etc.
  • Details of what's being scanned.  Mine site, house, dive site, sculpture, vehicle, museum artefacts, etc, etc.
  • What the goal is of the scanning, what level of detail, accuracy is needed
  • How it's being scanned, manually, drone, uav, rov, turntable, lidar, aircraft, satellite, etc, etc.
  • What camera(s) are being used, and their settings
  • Any pre-processing of imagery, data structure, etc.
  • Details of the Hardware it's being processed on, pc, laptop, mac, what gpu, networked, cloud, etc.
  • What version of Metashape is being used at the time
  • Details of each of the MS Workflow steps, align, mesh, texture, dem, etc. etc. and Settings used.
  • Including reasoning for the settings, if you have any, or that the default was left unchanged.
  • Details of optimisation steps, gradual selection, optimise cameras, etc, and the settings chosen for each
  • Details of any steps take on the resulting models/meshes/DEMs, etc.
  • Details on the processing times for each step.  And any times for different settings chosen
  • What the models, meshes, DEMs, etc. are then used for.
  • How the models, etc are exported.
  • Details of what parts of the workflow could really need some advice fixing, optimising
  • Details of what parts of the workflow could really do with some new features or changes to Metashape.
  • Details of the bugs encountered, fixed, workarounds, which versions worked, or was needed to downgrade to.
  • etc.
  • etc.
  • etc.

A sticky post could have a suggested layout template. including the above points and others, so that we may have a good structure to each workflow post.  Similar to a bug submission template.

The workflows submitted will then be available for us all to learn from, but also for any of us to critique, make suggestions, help fix problems they'd listed, etc.
It would also be great if the users could return, to edit the Original Post (OP), to update it to their current, corrected, optimised workflow, with some change notes at the bottom.
As Metashape itself develops, new features are included, bugs appear and are fixed, the workflows will continuously change, so it'll be excellent if the OP would be updated

I've already previously posted most of my workflow, but it's already changed from what I'd written originally, after some tests and reading stuff on here.  So I'll try and update that soon.  And i'd be definitely be posting it in this sub-forum, if we can get it.

We've got a great user community here, with decent support and feedback from the Agisoft crew.  So having somewhere we can post our workflows would just be even better.

Thanks.