Agisoft Photoscan Workflow Tutorial

hi there my name is Brittany Johnson I'm a student at Carleton College and today I'm going to be showing you some tricks and techniques I've picked up to create 3d models using photogrammetry in agisoft photoscan I'd like to show you just my typical workflow I am by no means an expert yet and I'm still learning some of the best practice items for doing this kind of work first things first what we're going to do is going to start by adding a chunk and once we're in our chunk we're going to add photos I've already taken and separated out the photos we're going to be using today of a Braccio conglomerate a type of fossil rock from the Dana minerals collection that Carleton colleges geology department uses so you can see down here the photos have imported they are waiting we're going to go back up to here back into workflow and we're going to align photos I'm going to keep it on medium and generic just because my computer doesn't have crazy processing power and I'd like to get through this as quickly as is reasonable some things we're going to watch out for are going to be some photos in here that I don't think are going to properly align on the first try so we're actually going to do those ourselves using markers first things first though we're going to let this process and get settled in which luckily you won't have to wait for alright we are back and we have gotten our sparse point cloud based on our photo alignment clicking this camera button on the top toolbar here will toggle the assumed positions that the program will make itself for where it thinks you were positioned focus follow along when you took the picture you can see here that there are two main rings unfortunately I do actually have a third ring down here though this is where the markers are going to come in because the program is having a little bit of trouble reading and referencing these photos against the other sets that I have so we're actually going to be manually aligning these photos by setting markers on our grid and pieces of the rock I personally like to keep a little notepad next to me here when I'm working on my points to help reference them actually this isn't too bad for just having the two rings of photos but it can be better and we can fill in some of these gaps on the side if we use our photos here now now my preference is always to start with blue and orange because it's the left one on the side number one here but what I'm going to do is start on the outside of blue I'm going to right-click I'm going to create marker and that's going to be one so on my little notepad I have sitting next to me I'm going to write point one blue outside now I've done this enough times that I kind of just remember and know where all of my markers are going to be but if you're maybe doing this for the first time I highly recommend that you keep a notepad and you just you don't have to go fast just keep an eye on what you're doing where you're doing it create marker you want at least four points on each of these photos and you'll go back to one of your photos that has matched when you're done setting them on your unmatched photo and you will align one two three four on the photos up here too so I'll go in and I'll say one two three four but I like to do that in the end so I can do them all in one fell swoop you want at least four points per photo I think I mentioned that but I like to do a few more and I like to make sure I get ones that are at varying depth because if I'm only doing photos that are down here on the bottom so I points on the photo set it down here on the bottom you're only really getting a 2d representation of what is actually going on in this photo and because I'm going one two three four I actually want to jump over to another photo that's got my other color here and I want to put five and six on here just to keep it even and in order that's important generally I look for items that are also good to make markers on like decimal points if you're working with something that has labels decimal points are another excellent piece to label we don't have a decimal point but I can tell a really good one is going to be the bottom of this seven so I'm going to make sure I have one two three four five six is behind the rock so seven and eight are going to be this one here seven it up I already put down seven and eight fun fact you can just remove these really easily by right-clicking on them when you want to put a one in that you've already created just moments earlier in fact what you do is right click place marker and put down the next point then I want my bottom of my seven to be another point that'll be point ten so now I'm just going to go through these photos and I'm going to assign these points to all of the squares nobody wants to see me do that for an hour so I will pause the tutorial here and fast-forward through doing that if anyone at home is thinking wow this part looks really tedious I'm not going to lie to you it kind of is but it's necessary if your points have an aligned way you want them to and it's especially important if you've got photos like these that will provide more data it's just a matter of getting the program to reference and read them correctly and that's why I have Spotify running in the background normally when this program is running and trying to do something you don't want to be running other programs in the background I would say not even Chrome just because you want that extra memory and that extra processing power to be going to this program it will speed it up a ton and you'll thank me later but for now when you're just assigning points it's perfectly all right to have a bit of music or a video going in the background and I kind of recommend it otherwise you just start getting lost in an endless ocean of pixels and markers a couple other things I would like to point out is that you can name markers so if you wanted to be naming these like red outside square red green intersect whatever you could do that if you wanted to I am fine just using the point names because I've kind of got some odds on the outside evens on the inside goes in pairs blah blah blah that's pretty self-explanatory and then everything I kind of usually skip 9 and then points after 10 or what I use to mark special places on whatever I'm modeling as far as height goes also save often because putting in these points is mostly just tedious work that takes a long time and I don't want you to lose that so please remember to say all right so I've gone through now and I've added the bulk of the points we're going to be using you can see them here rotating with it I still would like to add a couple more just so I like no 100% for sure that it's going to see depth and things correctly so I'm just going to take a look up on the ones that I know worked and see if there's any kind of points that stand out to me that might make a good area to put a marker generally things that have like a little bit of an identifying feature work well if there's any points on the object where things kind of come to a tip or missed colorations actually not seeing a whole lot on this rock which is probably why the program was having a hard time building the sparse cloud to begin with I'm going to make a marker in this rusty spot here at the top of the rusty spot right here I'm going to set a marker then on some of the photos down here and it is on the between blue and red green so we can just come down here between blue and red green there it is I'm going to put marker 11 here no marker and we're just going to jump onto the photos next to this one and put mark 11 in about the same place and this just helps me feel more confident that the program will create an accurate representation of the new photos I'm trying to put in you want to have things at various depths height just to make sure that it builds a nice picture definitely get it from a couple different angles if you can I think we'll be able to get it on a few from the beginning - yes here we go so now the really fun part is we go back up to some of the pictures that did online when we put the program initially and we need to set the markers we've set onto these photos so I'm going to zoom in on my blue square I'm going to say place marker one place marker 2 I'm going to do this around the entire board for the ones I established on my unaligned photos at the bottom here's another helpful little reminder to make sure you're saving while you do this you want to have your unaligned reference markers referenced on at least two photos that are aligned so now you'll notice when I went to this one I got these red guidelines and this is just age of soft letting me know that they have kind of an idea where they think I'm going to be putting my second round of points and as usual they're pretty pretty spot on here so now I'm just going to add these and you'll notice I haven't put my side ones on yet that's because I feel like I can't quite see them from this angle so my little rusty spot and my bottom of the seven I'm going to put on using a different set of photos again I just feel like that will help me get a more accurate representation when I align these photos in and rebuild my sparse clouds you can barely see the bottom of the Sun so I'm going to go to my kind of lower angle photo and you'll notice now that I've added references for these points onto two other photos they've automatically put themselves in here and for the most part they're looking pretty good so I just need to jump in here and say this is where point 10 is and I'll jump into another one and I'll say yep this is where point 10 is point 11 was between one two and seven and eight so I need to go back a little ways work forward it's the case maybe yep and there's my rough spot so now I'll just pop in and say 11:00 is here in the upper arch and it's got a good idea of again for me now everything is photo referenced and if I look at the model I'm going to see these points referenced on the model so unfortunately our programs did crash so I've got to catch this up a little bit but because you're remembering to save often we're not too terribly far behind and I'm going to be able to get us cut up in just a minute here and so now you'll notice when we move over to the model which is hiding down here the points we put on the photos have now aligned onto the model itself so put you back around with you there we go the ones down here are aligned and you can see why I said we should do some ones on the height here just because if all of our points are on the sheet then it kind of gives us a very flat set of references here so now we're just going to jump back over to our photos and you'll know the ones that aren't aligned because they don't have the same green checkmark this checkmark here on the side shows that it is aligned and as part of this map that is formed up here on your model that one's pink because I had it selected down here so we want to go down to all the ones that don't have check marks and we're going to right click we're going to go up our little menu and we're going to say align selected cameras now that already aligned themselves to the photos so all that's left is for them to align themselves to your model and to pull out some sparse cloud data from your photos again they're pink because these the ones we've selected and in general it looks pretty good looks pretty good everything is in a circle which is what I was able to do a couple of overlapping ones which I did let's get into the model itself I'm going to toggle off our cameras push you up here you need to rotate you around so you got to go back over here excellent and you can see that there is like some more scattering of data that's off to the side here but it's not too terribly bad that can happen especially when you're lining photos yourself because you're not as quite as precise as the computer is but in general I think we sold a lot of holes by adding these other photos so now what I want to do is just kind of a practicing I just want to do some gradual selection I want reconstructive uncertainty I'm just looking for a point where some of these outside ones are going to come off not all of them that's probably an appropriate level for now I'm going to say that you can see these points that are kind of this mauve reddish color are the points that it doesn't believe are accurate sometimes when you align model when you align photos like this on your model you can see kind of an overlap in areas where things have been aligned perfectly but you're more likely to see that in the dense cloud so anyways I'm going to I'm going to delete these ones and then I'm going to go up to workflow and time for everybody's favorite part the dense cloud and this one's going to take me a much longer time to process I'm going to leave it on medium quality because there's a lot of detail on the top and I'd like to keep that if I had more time I would run this in high quality but today we're just going to be satisfied with medium so we're going to give that a go leaving the defaults on this is probably going to load photos really quickly and then the rest of it and probably take half an hour or more so I think I'll go get dinner and if you're doing this at home I advise you take a break stretch write a novel do your homework for your other class try not to run things in the background on this computer because it's going to impact how fast it's able to process and we want this to be working as efficiently as possible so for those of you watching video this is going to be fast forwarded and I'll see you in a minute alright so we finished processing our dense clouds out of our newly aligned photos from the bottom here and if you go to the top you see this multicolored collection of nine squares click on that to activate your dense cloud and as you can see it's starting to look a lot more like the 3d image we want and thanks to the extras put in using down here it's a lot more full on the sides and it would be if we were just using higher angles that's why I like to make sure to get some lower shocks like that even though they don't always map automatically so from here I'm going to duplicate this process we just did aligning photos turning them to a sparse cloud and then to a dense cloud I'm going to do that with another chunk that'll be the bottom of this block and then I'll show you how to merge them so that you have one single 3d model of this rock no base no hole on the bottom just a solid rock already the photos from chunk two have finished aligning now as you can see but unfortunately we've run into the same problem we ran into with chunk one where our side profile images didn't correctly aligned like ours top angle images so we're going to go through that same process of assigning markers in order to bring those into the same alignment as these other ones I'm not going to walk you through that process again if you are interested just go back we watch that from chunk one I promise I'm doing the same thing and I'll talk to you again when I have the density cloud from chunk two ready to merge all right so if we want to set this up to be able to align and merge properly with the other one you'll notice I've made some more duplications over here that's just so that I know we have things so if I screw this one up we can just jump on to the next one and not have too many worries we want to merge chunk one copies and chunk to copy over here to do that we're going to get rid of this messy base they're sitting on by using our friends up here the selection tool at this point I don't really need the pictures so I'm just gonna I'm actually just going to close that so I can work in this space you just kind of want to make sure you're looking at the base head on get it as flat as you can and then for this part I usually like using the square tool for my select door just so I can pop up here grab that take a look alright I missed a few but I can clean them up pretty easily so edit delete section I can come back in scoop out these guys pretty easily this polygon tool looks like it's fancy but it's a normal polygon tool you just have to drop a circle where you want it edit delete and it missed a bit delete and they'll probably shave off just another small layer underneath just to make sure I've cleaned it up so we're going to going to take another peek yeah not quite liking all the junk that's over here so I'm just going to take another sliver off the bottom we have plenty of overlap with our other chunks so I'm not too worried about it just gonna move on in like this and edit delete so we're over here we're going to go into our copy of copy of chunk one this one's a bit Messier but should be able to clean it up just as easily oops I want my select door mover jump back into our rectangle bring that up and it delete looks pretty good looks like two halves of a hole that's a little bit gross underneath there but let's see if I can rotate it properly to get at it I'll just use this one to kind of slip in there and clean a bunch of it out don't be afraid to reposition the model to clear it out you just do what you got to do and it delete and I'm going to turn markers off at this point we're not using these ones awesome okay so now that we've kind of cleaned up the bottom all we have is two halves of the same rock well you can see we have our tag there and our tag is somewhere on this one they're the same rock I promise we have the two halves we're just going to pop on into workflow align chunks we want to align copy up copy up copy of copy of one and two you point-based 65 is good and we'll let this run this process for a couple minutes and then I'll come back and we'll see if we were successful or not alright so we just finished aligning pieces through our workflow menu and now we're going to give a try to merging our two chunks we're not merging these guys appear we're just merging the copy of copy ups and we're merging our density clouds and yikes that doesn't look like what we want that looks like we've combined both of them onto the same plane without trying to flip them let's see here can we look underneath yep so we have not correctly merged these two which means we're going to have to set up some markers and tell the program which pieces of the rocks correspond so that it can try to build it a little bit better hopefully giving us an actual 3d model instead of two boxes like this stacked into each other so we're going to have to set up markers now on our model in order to try and fix what the program isn't quite reading correctly I'm going to want to do this by setting points on the model but first I want to clear all markers so I'm just going to go through here and delete all of these we should be good now to actually start on our markers and I find that on something like this our number tag is probably going to be a pretty safe place to start I've gone into view pains photos to open up my photos pane again just making sure all my markers are gone they are and that's good because now I'm going to restart markers but I'm going to look for ones that I think are going to be on both images so I'm going to start here one is going to be the bottom of the 7 or we're going to start with then I must have forgotten a 9 somewhere I must have forgotten a 9 somewhere so I think we're just going to just going to start with 10 11 I'm going to go 9 10 11 12 13 that's our first place to start we're going to jump onto another photo over here photos pain please and we're just going to pop the same thing same thing we did earlier yep place 10 so those two are now together we'll be able to see those on the model good good now we're going to go up to chunk 1 and we also need to delete these ones real quick we're just gonna can I just clear all my you let me just zoom in on these guys click them remove them gonna double-check down here I don't see any of the little flag marker icon so we should have them all cleared from here and then I'm going to look for our favorite number tag again there we go and I'm just going to cross-reference back on to real quick make sure I put the right number in the right place 10 11 12 13 we're going to rename it 10 but we're actually going to want it at the bottom of the seven eleven twelve thirteen it should match up with what we've got here 10 11 12 13 10 11 12 so let's do that 10 all right and I'm going to look for a couple other places now on the sides probably some kind of distinctive markings earlier we did use this rust spot but I don't think it's going to show up very well on our other side so I'm looking for something else like the way these note just going to try to move them and it's going to be somewhere more over here so I can see some problems with how our mapping is going already the program will probably be able to fix any small changes like that but it's still worth it to try to be as accurate as we can tell you what I'm going to go for the opposite side at the very tip of this white point in the rock I think it's this white spot here so I'm going to put 14 there 14 also comes with some rough spots but I think they're going to be too low on the other side so I'm going to skip them in favor of looking for something a bit more middle ish put our 14 in excellent so now if I as a human I'm having trouble identifying really good patterns to use it that just makes more sense as to why the program itself is not having a super easy time creating I'm going to have to go for a lower angle to find this one so this I think should be enough of a reference for the program now to be able to try and align these on its own so we're going to go back into a line we're doing our copy of copy of copy of but this time we're doing a marker based alignment instead of trying to get the program to figure it out itself so we're just going to click marker based and click OK and you'll notice it's much faster so we're going to go back into our workflow we're going to go into a line now that we've merged merge our dense clouds again much faster and our merge chunk looks a lot better doesn't it it's not quite in the middle here but we're working on it look at that much better there's some overlap of the rough edges that's to be expected but you'll notice it's an actual 3d model now if we take a look at our sparse density cloud we can see the overlap from where both pieces rested on the paper but we of course deleted that out of our dense models so now we just are left with this and there's a lot of cleaning up to do around the edges you can see here there's a lot of weird knobby bits that I'm sure will give us problems if I don't touch them and try to mesh with them there so I'm going to take a minute and clean those up before we try to build our mesh just one second you all right so unfortunately the program did hang up a bit so I've had to reset our markers I'm now working from these tiles marker chunk one marker chunk two to keep it straight and now I've just gone back to merging news density clouds and trying to clean up some of these edges here where things got a little bit funky like I said that's why we find me save often luckily because I've been saving I didn't lose too much work really just about two minutes of work so we're just going to go around these corners clean this up to the best of our ability and then we'll take a look at the actual mesh and using the mesh we'll be able to identify some of our problem areas this particular model has been a little bit more difficult for me because of the nature of the sign some of the pictures I were took weren't the best so it's been having a little bit of a trouble setting up the sides and sometimes you can see some of that and overlap like for here here for instance you can see a tiny bit of overlap in these points in this dark region and that just shows you where the density clouds isn't aren't fully aligned but luckily just by going through editing we can take out some of the extra points if we don't want them otherwise the program will just use where the density is the highest and build the mesh based on that all right so as an example of what I mean by overlap our mesh is finished processing and I'm going to flip over from our dense cloud to our writer frame and you can see here at the bottom there's these little kind of horns hanging on the side you can see there's some stray little islands there's some on the inside mainly what I want to eliminate is pieces like this in the corner here anything on top things a little bit rough over here and this I can see and we're just going to do that by going through and gently editing our density cloud so I'm going to rotate this the density cloud will match the same rotation as your wireframe so I highly suggest using that to match where you want to be now I'm just going to grab into my free hand tool and snip alongside the edge of the model all right so I've made our new mesh and it's looking looking pretty good to me this is obviously not going to be a perfect one I don't think it's as good as the other ones I've made but considering the amount of troubles I had my experience and the somewhat poor quality of the photos I was able to take that morning I'm pretty happy with this mesh I think there are a couple spots where it's a little rough so I'm just going to go into tools we're going to go down to mesh I want to smooth the mesh just one pass for now I don't want to lose too much of this detail on top this works there are a lot of stray shion's on the rock so I think this looks about right at any right I'm happy with it and I am ready to build the texture so we've got this handsome mesh we've done all this work time to go back into our work flow menu and we're just going to go right to build texture generally your defaults work fine the texture size is a little large for some online hosts but you can usually share these files pretty easily using Google Drive or whatever your preferred file storage format is I'll come back to you in just a second when our texture is done and we can talk about our final results all right well now our texture has been made and we can access it by going up to our texture pyramid at the top it's the one with the little tree and Sun and sky and we click that and boom there it is a beautiful texture for a beautiful 3d model I've got some texture projection errors here that I'm a little too happy about this one looks like it came in off of our grid that we originally had the rock sitting on so I'll probably go back off cam and fix these little spots but otherwise I am pretty happy with what we've got and I hope this has been an equally enlightening learning opportunity for you so now you have your model not specifically this one I'm going to be fixing this one up before I actually publish it but to export it to other file types just go to file export model choose your type down here save it where you'd like call it what you like and you're good I hope this has been a helpful tutorial I'm Brittany Johnson just a student at Carleton College and this is just what I've learned on my own experimenting with a clock so of its can have a good morning day evening wherever you are and I'll see you again later

Channel: Brittany Johnson

Views: 187,201

Rating: 4.9053907 out of 5

Keywords: agisoft photoscan, photogrammetry, tutorial, workflow, detailed, rocks, geology, fossils, photoscan, 3d modeling

Id: Uny9nTr22go

Length: 39min 48sec (2388 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 22 2017