Newbe question: difference between Standard and Pro edition

[sastun1962]

Hi to all,
excuse me for the "basic" question.
I have a Standard edition and I'm involved in archaeological reconstruction.
My question is about:
- alignement of cameras/chunk
- refinement of the surfaces of the mesh
- exporting with metric reference in PDF

in Standard edition I have encountered some problem when change light in a tunnel of excavation and the chunk cannot be aligned corectly.
With some ceramic piece I have problem due to the irregular mesh (rough) reconstructed
In PDF of the textured model I would like to have a metric reference with the model.

Is a limitation of the Standard edition or is the same in the Pro too?
many thanks in advace for the answers.
all my best

[ozbigben]

The pro edition has extra features for aligning cameras using control points in the images to help align things. These are also used to provide information for setting the correct scale. Inserting a scale reference may be useful for visual interpretation but the model should also be scaled accurately so that measurements can be made. This is much simpler with the Pro version.

There are some basic mesh repairs functions but you can also export the mesh for editing in other applications and then import the new mesh back into Photoscan to continue the workflow.  I use Meshlab and Meshmixer for editing meshes (and sometimes creating the mesh).

The quality of the mesh will depend on some of the setting you use in the workflow, particularly removing bad points from the sparse point cloud before generating the dense point cloud. You can also export the dense point cloud and create a mesh in another application such as Meshlab.

For the PDF you could add a scale reference to the mesh in another application and then create the PDF.  the PDF model is just an embedded U3D object file which can be added with Adobe Acrobat.

[Marcel]

Alignment problems and a rough mesh (noise)  are usually related to photo quality. If you show us some example photos  at full resolution we might be able to give some advice.

[sastun1962]

Thanks for the answer.
Due to the hi difference in price between the versions Standard and Pro I'll try to work with meshlab to adjust the mesh as suggested.
I hope to find the right way.
All my best

[chadfx]

Meshmixer is also a great tool for fixing problems with less than perfect geometry...more interactive than Meshlab, I have found.

[ozbigben]

As marcel suggested, if you can share some images here then others may be able to help you identify the problem and/or suggest settings which could improve the mesh/point cloud quality.

I'm using the standard version at the moment and am looking at a workflow for scanning entire objects.  For a high resolution mesh I take 3 sets of images with the object in different orientations, generate the point clouds for each set in Photoscan, crop the point clouds and then align, merge and generate a mesh in Meshlab and edit the resulting mesh in Meshmixer if required.

e.g. https://sketchfab.com/models/4bb8f7abd0a84a36be37a81feb9732f2

With a DSLR I can give our NextEngine laser scanner a run for its money.