Agisoft Photoscan Pro - basic workflow

first we need to import our photo sets and remove any obvious outliers or mistake photos from the set this includes blurry photos and photos with obvious obstructions we can also arrange the photos into chunks if your object has two separate sides such as a top and a bottom the second part of this first step is creating masks this step is optional but it does tend to front-load the effort so that you're spending less time editing your point clouds later on Photoshop is required for this demonstration but there are other free methods that I'll discuss elsewhere first we import the file folder in which your photos are stored we go to workflow add folder you navigate to the folder in which you stored your photos select and then you click the Create camera from each file which creates a camera view from each photo in your file all of your photos that appear then just taking a quick look at my photos I notice that a hand is obscuring one of them so I'm going to delete that from the photo set you can either click delete or the button that has the X on it to create masks we're going to create a background image and then apply it to the rest of our photos as a mask so to do this you're going to open the original file which you stored your photos open the first photo in Photoshop go to edit fill black opacity 100% and then save as a JPEG called background you can keep the default settings usually and then close out of Photoshop and then close out of the file folder you're then going to go to tools import import masks and you're going to adjust the settings for the tolerance and the location of that file that you just saved so in this case we're going from background you're going to name the file that you just made background JPEG and you're going to apply to all cameras and click OK then you're going to find the folder in which you saved that background image select it and then the program is going to apply that mask to all of your images this process can take anywhere from one and a half to three minutes once the masks have finished uploading you can view them two different ways you can double click on your photo and see where the grayed out area and the mask has been applied there or you can click on the icon and toggle the view of the mask on your thumbnails on and off to see where the mask is you've been applied or not applied overall in this next section we're going to talk about how to edit the masks so that the areas that the program missed are included in the mask or the areas of your object that you want included in the model are not accidentally masked you can do this a number of ways using hotkeys generally tends to speed the process but you may not want to use them at first so we're going to start looking at the mask images by clicking on them and clicking around you can see there are some areas at the program missed the way to include these missed areas are by using the different selection tools provided on either the top toolbar or by using the hotkeys here we're going to use the rectangle tool to select and then add the selection to the mask you can do that by right clicking and clicking add selection or you can do it by using the hotkey ctrl shift a to add in this case we're going to use the magic wand to select the areas in the hotkey control shift a to add them to the mask in some cases of extreme detail you see that the program sort of misses them on the masks so here we're going to use intelligent scissors to cut around the teeth of this fossil and then subtract them from the mask and then we're going to go back in with the magic wand to get the background out of that area by adding it to the mask so again using intelligence scissors to cut sort of a broad swath around the teeth subtracting it from the mask and then using the magic wand to select the background around the teeth again and add it back into the mask next we're going to align the photos and edit the resulting sparse point cloud I put a reference here for the initial steps that you can use to make the point cloud easier to deal with one thing to keep in mind is that if you're not happy with how any of your masks turned out you can always reset them by right-clicking on a thumbnail and selecting reset masks and applying to either all cameras or just one of them once you're happy with your situation you can go to workflow align photos the settings I usually use our high accuracy pair selection is deselected and the advanced settings I use are key point limit 400,000 and Ty point limit ten thousand and I make sure to constrain features by mask I usually select high accuracy as opposed to very high or medium because it doesn't take significantly longer than medium but it is significantly shorter than the highest setting okay and now I'm going to skip ahead while this runs once the model is done aligning the dialog box will disappear and it won't look like much has changed until you click on the model tab and you will see your sparse point cloud appear here we can see our sparse point cloud already looks a lot like the model we are eventually trying to end up with if your point cloud looks like this early on you know you're on the right track one viewing option I'd like to mention now is in the View menu item and you can go to view show hide and show hide cameras the cameras will show you if you have a good set that position all the way around the object and if your sparse point cloud do not turn out the way you wanted this will show probably why now I'm going to hide the camera positions again and we're going to use some of the built-in editing tools for editing the sparse point cloud all these tools are found in the Edit menu and actually under gradual selection so the first option we're going to choose is reconstruction uncertainty we're going to give it a value of 10 doing this will highlight a lot of points on the model and you're going to want to delete all of them either by clicking the X or hitting delete then you're going to do that again gradual selection reconstruction uncertainty set it to 10 then delete this should get rid of a lot of those nonsense points around your model after you've done the reconstruction uncertainty procedure twice you're going to go to the reference tab and click the magic wand button where you're going to opera my optimize the camera positions you're going to select every camera position except the last two which are normally grayed out and then you're going to select ok which point the camera positions will be optimized next you're going to get into gradual selection again and you're going to select projection accuracy this time you're going to change the value of this to 10 as well click OK and then delete those selected points the final step is once again in gradual selection and you're going to choose reproduction error and you're going to make that value a little bit more than 1 and delete any points that show up if any do now we're going to use the selection tools to select any outlying points that this procedure missed we're going to choose the freeform tool for most of it and individually select the points which are highlighted here and delete them the more detailed you can get with this the less work you'll have to do later on also before moving on to the next step make sure that your model fits completely within the bounding box generating a dense point cloud takes the most time out of any of the steps all you're going to do is go to workflow build dense cloud and the settings you're going to choose I always choose high which takes longer than any of the medium or low settings but it generates a better model and I've read recommendations that you don't deviate from aggressive depth filtering unless you have a really really really good reason so this is going to run for anywhere from twenty to thirty minutes so I'm going to go ahead and skip ahead and sometimes it will run much longer for higher quality models or more complex models once again that dialog box is going to disappear and you are going to see at the topmost toolbar an icon that says dense cloud when you click on that it's going to transform your sparse point cloud into a dense point cloud and you can examine it and edit it further with the selection tools as you can see there's a few spots that are out of place and the more of these you can eliminate the better your eventual mesh your eventual model will be I'm going to finish editing this dense point cloud and then we're going to move on to creating the mesh before generating your mesh make sure once again that the dense point cloud is within the bounding box region then we're again going to go again to workflow and then build mesh we're going to choose arbitrary surface type and the surface data is going to be gathered from the dense cloud and the Advanced Options I usually leave those at their defaults generating the mesh takes a few minutes but not quite as long as generating a dense point cloud I'm now going to skip ahead so we can take a look at the finished product once again the dialog box will disappear and you will toggle among the icons on the topmost icon bar there are several options for viewing textured and untextured meshes and point clouds if you want to export a model texture you have to build the texture this option is also found in the workflow menu go to workflow build texture and choose the options that best fit your needs I usually go with blending mode average and enable color correction and enable water type model this usually happens pretty quickly but it takes a couple minutes once the texture is built it won't look any different but you will be able to export the model with the texture intact exporting the 3d model is the final step in this process you can choose the best file type to suit your needs whether your 3d printing or using the model for measuring or visualization you can export it with the texture intact or not and just export the underlying mesh photoscan offers options for all of these here you can see I'm opting to export the model in a dot obj format there's a dialog box that offers you options for how to export your model and whether or not you're going to export it with texture and what file type that texture is going to be in and all right that's it you have your exported model ready to go

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Length: 14min 4sec (844 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 17 2016