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 →
Batch Script for running AliceVision MeshRoom from command line
Here's a script to reduce the processing of AliceVision's Meshroom to a single double click. Much as I did for COLMAP, (and here) I've put together a batch file that can just be dropped into a folder of photos and double clicked to run the full Meshroom process and produce a filtered, textured model without... Continue Reading →
Free photogrammetry software review: 2017
Given how insanely popular my 'trying photogrammetry software' series has been this year, I thought I'd round up what I've tried, what's worked well, and what hasn't. Obviously I gave each piece of software in my blog posts a go with a standard dataset. That photo set was not ideal - it includes photos taken... Continue Reading →
Automating free photogrammetry: Scripts I use
[updated 17/12/17 to get rid of unnecessary meshlab portion] [updated 01/04/18 - Updated scripts for version 3.4+ of COLMAP] In a vain attempt to be useful, I want to share the script I'm currently using to automate my photogrammetry workflow. I'm using COLMAP in conjunction with openMVS on Windows 10 at the moment, and I... Continue Reading →
Photogrammetry Testing 11: VisualSFM & OpenMVS (and COLMAP+openMVS)
Part 1: Photoscan | Part 2: VisualSFM+MeshRecon | Part 3: VisualSFM+PMVS+Meshlab | Part 4: OpenMVG + MVE | Part 5: MVE | Part 6: ReMake | Part 7: SMVS (+MVE) | Part 8: COLMAP | Part 9: 3DF Zephyr Free | Part 10: MicMac | Part 11: VisualSFM + openMVS, & COLMAP + openMVS |... Continue Reading →