Basic Agisoft workflow

all right so we're going to do a quick video kind of describing the workflow in a G soft métis shape here before you have got a folder where I have some of the projects I've been working on and we're going to open up this one here called neck sitio glyph and as you can see inside of that folder I've got a three folder structure one of them that says photos another one output and the other one says export and so what you want to do to get started is take all your photos of the object for photogrammetry and dump them into here so you will likely have raw photos and JPEGs all in one to go ahead and dump both of them in here in their photos folder so now what you want to do is create an Adi soft project so you can just open up a G soft and once it's open you can go ahead and hit file save as go and find that place where you're going to save it mine was the next C to a cliff and you want to save it here in the output folder so I already have one saved from before I'm gonna go ahead and save a different version here alright should here in the top left and we're ready to get started so the first things first identify this tab up here called workflow in the workflow tab when you click it it has all the things necessary that you would need in order to put together a 3d model using photos including where to start so we're going to go ahead and click here at add photos and we're going to search for that photos folder and we're gonna have to we're going to want to take every single photo that you took in the field so we'll hit ctrl a ctrl a just allows you to highlight everything and then hit open and you'll see them populate in the photos pane in add you soft so I can see them over here if I want to inspect my photos within the software all you have to do is give it a couple click and then you can use the mouse scroll to actually zoom in and out to check different parts of your your image to see if you have a good photo or a bad photo another trick is to right-click your photo and then go to where it says estimate image quality and you can actually have the computer estimate the image quality for all of your cameras by doing that it'll give you a value between zero and one and typically you want something above the threshold of 0.5 to be a good photo so just a little tip there to get started go ahead and close that out hit workflow align photos this is the first step and you want to get all these photos aligned to recalculate that geometry basically it's going to look for key points and tie points in every single image trying to match them to other images so it can get rolling we're going to leave it in high and anytime you do an alignment my advice is just to have it on high generic pre selection is just fine and then you could theoretically go ahead and hit OK with all the default settings if you ever want to play around with those you just click here and advanced open up key point limit and tie point limit you can change these values around a little bit and my advice would be to get on the agile soft meta shape manual and look up what these things mean and you you will be able to kind of make some judgment calls as to how you might want to change those numbers around alright let's just go ahead and hit OK and I'll run a photo alignment okay looks like we finished our photo alignment here and we have all of our photos aligned if you just kind of click here in this little transparent ball you can spin things around this is kind of a little tumbler for you to navigate in 3d space the other control you want to get used to is the middle mouse button clicking it down and dragging this is how you pan the model from side to side zooming is just scrolling with the mouse scroll and then of course tumbling right and then the last thing is if you for some reason the models like well here and your tumblr swinging it around like this just double click the model and it puts it right there in the center of your tumblr so you can kind of reset the navigation so looking at the images it looks like we have good coverage right in here I took a few context shots back here but you can actually see the side of the wall forming you know it's kind of a zig zag and this I was very focused on this glyph that was on a stone here and built into the side of the wall so this is typically where you say okay I've got a successful photo set that has been aligned and the rest of it is likely to be a good model so as long as you can see the general image or the general shape of the feature that you're trying to take it's usually a success so the next step which is actually by the way if you are trying to get these little cameras to come up so you can see the camera positions you toggle this on and off where it says show cameras and that's what makes that appear if you're just getting blue tiles with no image on the back and you want the images then you just hit the down arrow click on show thumbnails and that toggles on the image to the back of the camera position so the next step I'm going to turn these off would be to create a dense cloud again you go back to your workflow tab click on dense cloud and you've got a few choices to make here I would just leave it on default for now and run what you have there on low low is just gonna save a little bit of time but it will make it will create less points on the object itself but if you want to test some out some more dense clouds you can put in you know medium or high it's just going to put more points on the surface of your object that a little later be interpolated into a mesh so we're going to hit low and we're going to go ahead and hit change depth filtering to aggressive and we're going to hit okay alright I don't know how long you waited but a with the magic of videos and online videos I was able to kind of have it go right to the dense cloud here as you can see there's a lot of points now on the surface and when i zoom out you can definitely see your object there is probably some extraneous points that could be cut away to kind of improve your model so at this point you can start making some decisions as to what you what you actually want to delete so over here next to the little arrow icon is your selection tool which I tend to use the freeform selection and you drop that down click on freeform and that way you have a little lasso do that so you can actually lasso groups of these points and then just hit the Delete key and it gets rid of them that way it doesn't affect your model in any way so I know I want to get rid of all these points so I'll get my lasso out of all of those delete nice looks a little bit better maybe I don't want the top of this so I just kind of swing the lasso around and hit delete and bottom looks good I'll just leave it the way it is no the tumblr ball is gone and you may be trying to move this around and visualize it differently but there's just a selection tool and you have to keep in mind you have to switch back to the tumblr which is this little arrow here and now the ball is back in in there to deselect I get usually what I do is I just grab a selection tool and select off the model and it gets rid of the pink selection and then I go back to your little arrow okay our next step here is to go to workflow again and go to build mesh click on that we're gonna get another dialog reminiscent of what just happened there with the dense cloud and in the dialog it's going to ask you what you want to interpolate what's the source data and we're going to choose dense cloud since that's what we just created leaving everything there and default except think a little bit more about how many polygons you want to create your model and you'll see what I mean just a second what what I mean by faces or polygons for a 3d model I'm gonna go ahead and choose medium and I'm going to click OK and it'll it'll skip to the mesh it looks like we're almost done there we go got the mesh over here and new visualization tools up top you know you have your sparse cloud your dense cloud tool or visualization and then you have a mesh visualization that shows up as a little green triangle when you click that you'll notice that it has become solid it's no longer points so you can zoom in and it looks kind of distorted what you're looking at is a colorized mesh or shaded mesh if you drop this down you can look at it solid to see what the geometry looks like you can also look at it as a wireframe and when you look at the wireframe you see kind of what I was talking about with polygons or faces but you have multiple triangles that are just kind of you know put together to create the 3d geometry of the object itself down here in the bottom left you can see how many faces are actually making up the object and here we have 60,000 the higher that number the more definition you're going to see in your object but also the longer it's going to take to compute so the next step here if we if we were happy with what we see and we don't want to edit anymore I'm just going to edit I'm going to get the freeform tool and I'm going to kind of straighten up the bottom here and hit delete alright we're gonna save my progress once we're ready to move on we'll go back to the workflow tab we'll go to build texture which is our final step and to be honest with any sort of object or feature that's fairly you know good size too small you can just leave everything on default here and just hit OK so now what it's going to do is take all of your photos and find the best photos for the job to actually wrap and create a photorealistic texture wrapping the photos around the 3d object and so it's going to recalculate and stretch these images to work around the geometry there so we'll wait on that alright so your texture finally finished processing and now you are looking for it and it's nowhere to be seen you might have to actually activate it up here where you kind of click down the green pyramid your mesh and you click on the textured mesh actually showing the texture wrapped around the mesh so click it sometimes it'll take a little while to pop up because it takes it you know for some reason it's computationally heavy and takes a little while to actually visualize there but you know once it's done hopefully you'll be happy with the results of what you have there when you have your photo realistic texture wrapped around the mesh so you can see our little Zapotec guy Dixie Joe okay last step here is to actually export your model so you can visualize it maybe in another software or give it off to another researcher we what you have to do to export its go to file export export model click that decide where you put it remember the three folder structure put it in the export folder and we will just call it whatever we want here I'm going to call it an xhr cliff and you can choose what kind of 3d model you want to export typically that Adobe PDF is fairly shareable between people the kind of a default or a standard format to export in would actually be obj let's click obj and let's save I had it already exported so it's just asking if I want to replace it I'll go ahead and say yes then we have the dialog that pops up here what I typically will do is switch my JPEG texture to PNG texture everything else I'll leave in default and just hit OK so now it's exporting your model and if you open up your actual folder folder where you have the three folder structure you go to your export what you'll find in there are a set of files now typically I have a few more files in here because this is another project I was working on but typically it'll just be three files you'll have your obj MTL and whatever image file you decided to export in and PNG in this case so if you decided to go with jpg it'll be a jpg file so at minimum with this obj you're gonna have three files obj MTL and whatever the texture is and later on when you kind of get more advanced with the texture dialog you might actually create more texture files to where you might have to five ten forty in order to improve resolution on much larger objects so but that's basically it from start to finish using your workflow tab to kind of work through the different steps in the workflow in photogrammetry the final thing I want to mention here is that between the align phase in the building your dense cloud to improve and the calibration in between your cameras after the alignment you can go in here to tools click optimize cameras and just hit OK what that's going to do is just use the metadata from all of your photos which is automatically detected and it's going to use that to optimize the alignment of all of your cameras before you move on with the workflow so I would suggest making that part of your standard workflow where you go from your alignment phase after the initial alignment and doing a optimize cameras which is just under

Channel: Alex Elvis Badillo

Views: 7,717

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Agisoft, Photogrammetry, 3D, Basic, workflow, Metashape

Id: 2kvT93QlFto

Length: 15min 0sec (900 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 14 2019