I tested the beta in regards to the LIDAR meshing and aligning with photos, photos without any GPS or positioanl data.
Initially I followed the tutorial but the tutorial uses prepositioned cameras with GPS so the workflow changes a bit.
NOTES:
-many times when placing markers on LIDAR it is created in the correct position but in Reference panel XYZ info is missing. Sometimes I need to add a marker 3-4 times for XYZ values to show up. ACTUALLY, afer messing around what occurs is that if right click placemerker-->new marker that allways fail to return XYZ but if right click-->Add marker, that seems to work, but in that case the marker enable check is off so is not visible until you go back to Reference panel to check it on.
-once marker placed on LIDAR seems not possible to fine tune position, unlike it is possible in 2d photos.
-when moving marker for fine tune in photo, please add a zoom rectangle in the window corner to pin pint it.
-after cameras are aligned with the laser scan, if I try to finetune adding marker in the scan and then adjust in the image, after moving the blue flag on the image the point in 3D scan gets moved! WTH! Shoulntd alsoshow up as green flag on the img?
-ONCE, when you save the project, the markers on the LIDAR data where lost !! [This only happened the first time], also the cloud moved to somewhere else!!. When this happened, I saved overwriting a previous attemp project, no sure if that oculd be related. Second and thir time I saved new project all worked fine. fingers crossed.
-when importing LIDAR if you select WGS84 EPSG 4326, after import, when you try to center the view, you get "Unsuported Datum" error window.
If you double click on the LIDAR in the Workspace, being it in an scan fixed group, app crashes
-tutorial fails to explain that in order for the markers to propagate properly, need to be matched in at least 2 photos. This is because tutorial aerial photos already are prepositioned.
-at some point my point cloud showed as NA and I had to reimport due to missing alignment, not sure what I did to ge this to happen.
-Overall the normal computation is accurate for a complex dense point cloud, yet ocasionally some areas like traffic lights or signs have the normals inverted, a tool to refine / armonize the normals of the point clouds would be nice. The meshing of dense point clouds is one of the best out there. I may revisit Meshlab since I've not tested for long but is the best meshing I recall to have seen.
-3d meshing is not possible directly from scan, it must be set as dense poitn cloud otherwise it dos not appear as source option in the dropdown when generating mesh.
-3d mesh is overwritten unless it is duplicated, changing the name won´t help, at least a warning of rewrite would have been nice.
-Intensity of the LIDAR seems not to load, cloud is black (I'm using .las), there should be some visulization options like the saturation of the sclarfile, like in Cloud Compare. I had to "boost" the intensity in Cloud Compare to check if that would make it visible in Metashape but still black. Aparently there is no way to "refresh" the point cloud in Metashape after saving it in Cloud Compare so I had to remove and reimport, yet, still black, I think this is a bug.
-LIDAR available scarlar fields are predefined, should instead show the ones in the .las file, like the missing scalar field GPS time. Or add a "custom" button and then read the ones in file and let user to choose.
-May be there is already option, I miss a quick way to change point size in runtime like press control and mouse wheel up down.
I miss the hability to have a temporal clipping volume, to isolate an area of the cloud in order to place markers, as it may be partially obstructed by other elements. Or even siimply to work ate higher fps rate.
I was unable to perform an incremental alignment, after importing new cameras, adding markers, being one part alread aligned it was not possile to align extra photos. warning meesage was shown saying new photos would not be ligned, I should check manual for incremental alignment, I did and all was set as should in theory. I had to re-run the whole alignment for all the photos by reseting previous.
I found this strange to happen, since I was aligning a sequential iamge set, and for the first part, when it failed I was able to select the failed cams, reset alignment, re run alignment for those cameras and the end ressult was really good. I can´t see why adding theese new, even with markers that bind the new cameras to the laser scan present, not possible to align, may be the markers need to be shared between images?
The second part does align in a separate chunk. May be right now, using sequential the only way is to compute inseparate chunks and later merge chunks. Since the reference LIDAR cloud is hte same, the markers will be valid on both sides, I guess.
The scan is a 2 level road so from one camera set is not visible the other. I used sequential at first but even with stimated it did not work until
a potentially glitchy behaviour is tat ocasionally the scans will stop being rendered, this seems to happen in duplicated chunks cointaining scans.
-I understand LIDAR will be tied to the pro license, but between pro and STD hte price gap is massive, may be at some point LIDAR module ass a DLC for the base would be superb, this is becasue nowadays there are a lot of free public lidar souces.
even if chunks are dissabled, they keep bein visible in model space should this happen? it's a mess.
It is happening to me that in the copied chunk the scan, being set a scan data is not present as option as source mesh, even if I unset as scan data and is set as dense poitn cloud, nothing is dissabled.
I wish it was possible to move stuff from one chunk to another easily by dragging, like the 3d model. If I accidentally missaling the 3d model on the copied chunk I would like to simpy do a quick transfer from the original chunk. It just happened to me that after adding markers to the second set of cameras, the meshed point cloud scale has gone nuts. not sure if a bug or expected behaviour. I see there is no lock transform option for models.
Merging chunks trashes the 3d model scale/position. Also scan clouds are not merged so I needed to reimport and remesh the scan.
MISC
camera gizmo plane scales over distance, not sure if I like this...
camera gizmo plane size should be easily resizable shift+ mouse wheel or similar.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Despite all the inconveniences, gitches etc, this is a moment I waited for so long for someone to finally care and merge this two technologies properly. Once polished this can be a gamehcanger.
Future
Once all is settled it would be nice if it started to add scan related features such as segmentation. But also I wish there where implementations like semantic segmentation on 2D images so that mascks can easily generated, removing cars, people, sky mask for edge rim fix etc.
If mesh is generated from point cloud it overwrites the mesh generated from depthmaps, may be should be a warning or option to not overwrite rather than having to duplicate beforehand
