Palaeontologist: Dinosaur Footprints – Biomechanics – Simulation
I experimented with macro photogrammetry using a small fossil and a Nikon Z8 camera with MC105 VR S lens. I used focus-shift and focus-stack with shallow depth of field. Reality Capture produced a good model from the focus-stacked images, but using the lens at f51 also yielded a great result. Both methods have their benefits.
I struggled with merging focus-shifted images using Photoshop and Affinity Photo but found success with Helicon Focus, though with some limitations. I then discovered focus-stack on GitHub, a simple command-line tool, which was comparable to Helicon Focus.
The user encountered challenges while attempting to use various methods to feed information into local Large Language Models (LLMs) via RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation). They explored methods such as Nvidia Chat with RTX, Ollama with Python scripts, and Ollama with Open-webui. Results varied, with some methods providing inaccurate or incomplete outputs. Comparatively, Microsoft Co-pilot, running GPT4-Turbo, significantly outperformed the local methods.
The other day, I saw that Capturing reality announced a new pricing plan for their photogrammetry software Reality Capture: https://twitter.com/peterfalkingham/status/1767573164614103112?s=20 Reality Captured wormed it's way into my heart as my favourite photogrammetry software. Initially, while I was blown away by the speed of Reality Capture, I had a bit of a rough first impression due... Continue Reading →
I reviewed Beholder Vision back in 2022, and then it was a web-based service, where you upload your photos, it produces a model, and you then download it. That service is still available, but Beholder have now released a desktop version. Best of all, it’s complete free for personal use. It’s technically ad-supported, though so... Continue Reading →
As with so much of my gadget life, I've been looking longingly over at the Apple ecosystem, in this context specifically for the amazing 3D scanning apps that are available for the iPhone and iPad. Because those devices have lidar on the back, 3D scanning apps work really well - using the camera to texture... Continue Reading →
**WARNING - this is a very niche rant** I'm quite a tech nerd. I enjoy gadets, and phones, and even writing software and addons. A big part of this is that I just generally enjoy interacting with my computer's operating system to get stuff done. I've been firmly embedded in Windows most of my life,... Continue Reading →
I've had a keen eye on Alicevision Meshroom since it's first major release back in... 2018? Development of the open source photogrammetry software has felt slow for the past few years, but just this week a new release was pushed out, 2023.1.0. Here's the official new feature list: Release Notes Summary Major improvements of the... Continue Reading →
Since I first started getting into Photogrammetry in a serious way, with my 2012 paper on using Bundler and PMVS, and throughout much of this blog’s life, I’ve been a massive proponent of free and open-source photogrammetry software. For years I used COLMAP, and then Meshroom. The latter was particularly good, offering a full pipeline... Continue Reading →
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 →
Prof. Peter L. Falkingham 