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 →
Windows is getting me down
**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 →
[Photogrammetry] Meshroom 2023.1 released
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 →
I’m A Reality Capture Convert.
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 →
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 →
Colour matching textures of two models with Photoshop.
Using "color match" in photoshop to make two photogrammetric models made under different lighting conditions, more consistent.
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 →