My wife recently upgraded her aging 2014 Macbook to a new 14" M1 Macbook Pro. Let me preface what I'm about to say with "I very much dislike MacOS and don't like using macs." Bear that in mind when I say I've never been more jealous of hardware. The MacBook Pro is beautiful, the screen... Continue Reading →
Neural Radiance Fields (NERF), and Instant-ngp – Future of photogrammetry?
I’ve been testing out instant-ngp recently, it’s an open-source software from Nvidia that generates neural radiance fields. That’s a 3D representation of an object that is fundamentally different from the points or verticies and faces we may be used to. Rather than representing an object through 3D coordinates, connections between them, and colours (i.e. vertices... Continue Reading →
[Photogrammetry Testing] COLMAP 3.7 and OpenMVS v2.0 [now with CUDA]
I saw recently that COLMAP had received an update to 3.7 in late Jan '22 (I'd previously tested 3.6 a year or more ago), though after a quick, unscientific trial, I didn't notice any particular changes to UI, workflow, speed, or quality of final model, so I didn't think it was worth a blog post.... Continue Reading →
[Photogrammetry testing] Beholder Vision (cloud based)
I was contacted just before Christmas by Alan Broun from Beholder Vision, asking me to give it a twirl and write about my thoughts. Beholder Vision, https://beholder.vision/, s a cloud-based photogrammetry solution. That means everything runs in the cloud, rather than on your local hardware. I tend to avoid the cloud-based solutions, because I live... Continue Reading →
Meshroom CL – The best free photogrammetry software now works without Nvidia
A little while ago I wrote about COLMAP-CL, a fork of the original project re-written so as to remove the reliance on CUDA, and therefore Nvidia GPUs. Now, from the same source, OpenPhotogrammetry on Github, comes Meshroom-CL. It's still in pre-release, at version 0.7, but I gave it a run through on my work iMac... Continue Reading →
Photogrammetry testing [Commercial] – ContextCapture
ContextCapture is Photogrammetry software from Bentley. In fact, it is a pretty comprehensive set of tools for photogrammetry, laser scans, meshing, GIS, etc. I was contacted by someone from Bentley, who asked me if I'd like to give it a test run. I was set up with a trial, but aside from that I've not... Continue Reading →
Adding thickness to your scans for 3D printing. Or… Making 3D surfaces into solids.
I scan a lot of 2.5D things. That is to say, 3D, but only a surface. Think dinosaur tracks, like this: One of the problems you can come across is if you want to 3D print something like this, it needs thickness. Visualization can also be helped if there’s context for the edges. I’ll outline... Continue Reading →
Macro photogrammetry – digitizing small details
A lot of the photogrammetry models I make, and that I generally see online are of decent sized objects, or even large buildings and terrains. But as long as you can take a decent photo of something, you can digitize it. A while ago I tweeted some nice Macro images of a fossil fish specimen... Continue Reading →
Epic games buys RealityCapture developer
This is very exciting news I came across on shuttercg.com - Epic games have acquired Capturing Reality, the developers of Reality Capture. This is a pretty big deal, I think. Reality Capture was by far, both the quickest and best quality photogrammetry software in my testing. However, their pricing model has been pretty ridiculous, either... Continue Reading →
Meshroom 2021.1.0 – What’s new, and what parameters to tweak
Last week the binaries for AliceVision Meshroom 2021.1.0 were released. I’ll take a look at what’s changed since the last time we took a look at Meshroom. Meshroom 2020 and texturing. The last time I posted specifically about Meshroom, it was version 2019.2. I didn’t make a post about 2020.1.0 mainly because texturing broke. Previously... Continue Reading →