Photogrammetry in Meshroom & Blender

hey I'm krump well and we're gonna be looking at mushroom today following the previous intro to photogrammetry we will be taking a look at the software that we'll be using to create our 3d mesh so in order to get the software we need to go and download it so you can see here that if you just do a quick search for it you can find that the first hit on Google at least is Alice visions and github page so we'll just click on that and it's a nicely designed website for Alice vision which is the company or group or framework that's responsible for the creation of mushroom you can see some of their software and libraries here so you can download mushroom directly from these links or you can click on the actual page that's dedicated to mushroom and we can see that mushroom is a free open-source 3d reconstruction software based on the Alice vision framework and they've been so wonderful to provide that to us completely free of charge which is great so we'll hit the download link and it will bring us to their github page in order to download the software now a word of caution going forward is that unfortunately at the time of this recording we only have the windows 64 architecture version of mushroom and the Linux version there is as of now no Mac version available so for you Mac users you're going to want to find an alternative and the unfortunate thing about this as I've found is that Mac does not have a wealth of photogrammetry software available to it in fact all of the alternatives that I'll show you to mushroom are all going to be either in Windows or Linux and not in Mac at all so that's one kind of unfortunate thing for those of you who are in my class in a lab we have access to the other half of the room which does have pcs that can run mushroom I've tried it myself and verified that it does indeed work so for those of you who need to use that it is available to you so obviously we want to grab the one or our operating system now I've already downloaded this so I'll show you what happens when we try to open it and how it works the great thing about mushroom is that it is a portable file which means we don't have to run an installer which means we don't need permissions in order to use it we can simply open up the zip archive and drag it out on tour Desktop or into our Documents folder wherever you're comfortable placing it now before we do that I want to make note of an additional requirement so unfortunately the software is very specific and requires that we have some certain hardware so the requirement for mushroom it can be found down here we need to have a CUDA enabled nvidia GPU so that's the graphics processing unit or the graphics card if you're familiar with that and it must be manufactured by Nvidia and be CUDA enabled so it's a specific type of graphics card now the fortunate thing about this is the majority of consumer grade graphics cards that you can buy from Nvidia are cuda enabled these days if you're running with an old card from years ago that might not be the case so I would highly suggest you look into whatever sort of graphics card you have in your machine and that can be done you know with the Google search depending on what sort of operating system you're working with and what sort of environment you're in but essentially we need to make sure that it has a compute capability of 2.0 or higher and the way that we can do this is I have another page here simply search up Nvidia CUDA compute capability and the first link that comes up is CUDA GPUs if we click that it'll bring us to invidious developer site where we see a category of different types of graphics products that Nvidia sells the top three here are higher-end or professional grade workstation types of graphic cards and then here we have the cuda enabled geforce products which are more consumer grade and these are going to be what you're going to see more often than not so if i open this the cards that I'm working with are the GTX 10 80 TI which is right here and the GeForce GTX 10 80 which is also right here both of these score a compute capability of 6.1 which is more than enough for those of you who are using notebooks or laptops that are Windows and are running with an NVIDIA GPU you can find that in this column here and you'll see that the lowest scoring card here is the for ATM and it scores a 2.0 which still meets our requirements I have not tried this kind of card so again approach at your own caution this will probably take some I'm for processing however if your card is on this list then it would most likely work with mushroom so just keep that in mind I know it's kind of annoying it is kind of early on to be seeing free and open source software for photogrammetry which is kind of amazing that we have mushroom available to us I don't know if they're watching but a big thanks to Alice vision for making that available to us a lot of other 3d photogrammetry software is pretty intensive and it's very technical mushroom is very well optimized for you new users as we'll see when we break into the software itself but other softwares are very expensive they're very technical there's a lot of setup for some of them and it can get difficult to really break into understanding how to use that software so good on Alice vision for making that available to us again thanks so much an alternative to mushroom if you want is 3d F or the 3d FS f er or 3d flow Zephir they'e they provide a free version of the software which we'll see here they do have a paid version which you have to buy and the free version does have some limitations so this is free for personal use only not to be used for commercial uses it you can use up to 50 images per project so there's a bit of a limitation on that but they say it's great for learning photogrammetry and one of the limitations that come with it is it does come as an installer which means you will need permissions on the machine that you're using in order to install the software at least that was my experience in the past so that's a big difference between mushroom and 3d Zephir and the reason why I chose mushroom over 3d Zephir that being also that mushroom I think is a little bit easier to use out of the box and so that's why we opted not to go with Zephir although it is an alternative in case you're curious another alternative is Autodesk recap previously known as Autodesk remake so if we go to their page Autodesk is kind enough to offer an educational license for students with a university email I believe it's a three year educational license that you can use in in order to get this piece of software along with other really well-known Autodesk software such as Maya or 3d studio max and you can use it for free under an educational license for three years I believe just note that the educational license has some limitations you can't use the software commercially and I believe technically under the license now don't quote me on this I'm not a lawyer but I believe that under the educational license that Otto just technically owns whatever you create with their software so be aware of that I've never actually heard of them making a claim of that or or going and taking anybody's assets or anything like that but I have heard rumors that that's the case and how the license work again I'm not a lawyer don't quote me on that but if you would like to try out some kind of professional grade photogrammetry software recap is a good option for students who have a university email one of the limitations again however it is only Windows software although I do believe you can use it with an iPad so do with that what you will alright but for our case I'm just gonna close these we're going to be sticking with mushroom so I'm gonna leave that there I'm gonna open up a viewer just bring it off to the side now I I downloaded mushroom already so it's already on this machine and I'm gonna find it here so once you have it downloaded into your downloads folder or wherever you keep things if you double click on the zip file here it'll actually bring you into this folder here and you can just take that folder and dump it on onto your desktop and like I said I've already done that but essentially you'll have all of these files inside of a mushroom 2018 point 1.0 folder and that's what we're going to be looking at using so let me just get to that real quick that I have this open I wanna show you if I double-click that in open mushroom you'll see we'll get a command prompt and we want to leave this open don't close that that'll be useful in case we need to debug mushroom which we really shouldn't have - like I said most of this just works right out of the box there is one error that I personally ran into and it was an error that was very specific to my own situation and so I will go over that very slowly because it is a bit technical but in case anybody else runs into something like this in class or on their own I want to make sure that I document it well so that people can follow along and solve it for themselves so as we go through this process and we'll make a note of that but other than that basically this is plug in place so once you have the images that you want to turn into your 3d object we have this little panel here where we can drag those images in or the entire folder in and we'll see little thumbnails of those images and mushroom will begin to kind of process them and see if there are some images that are unacceptable and other images that are fine and then we can view those images here in the center and then here on the right side and the 3d viewer is where we will view the object that mushroom will spit out for us once it's done processing all of our photos now at the bottom you'll notice this big intimidating chain of nodes and basically this is the process that mushroom is going to go through in order to generate your 3d mesh now you can move these nodes around in each of them have separate settings which we we can see here in our attribute panel I would highly recommend if you're a beginner do not mess with these settings if you screw up these settings simply close down mushroom and open up a new instance or you can say file new it's totally up to you but don't mess with these settings if you're brand new one of the things that we're still waiting on from alice vision is a set of clear documentation as of the time of this recording there is no official documentation or mushroom so although I understand certain things inside of each of these categories and kind of what they do we don't have a set of clear documentation or a manual to go along with this software they can really point out to us exactly what each setting does so I would again recommend that nobody mess around with these settings unless you're familiar you can go around and browse their github page there have been people who have left comments there are plenty of videos online of people using the software and some that even go as far as playing with a couple of settings here and there but for our purposes we are simply going to leave everything as is right out of box just to keep things as simple as possible so what I'm going to do is I'm going to quickly set up my project files I'm going to pause the video and do that really quickly and I'll see you in two seconds all right so I've taken the time to set up a folder for my project and I'll show that to you here so here I have this soldier folder which I have placed another folder in with all of my photos which are for some reason not showing up let me try to paste that maybe yep there they are so let's just change our view really quickly extra large icon so there we go we have all of our photos of my little soldier statuette that I have here in my home and I've taken photos of it they're not the best photos I didn't have a tripod at the time and so some of the settings with lights and stuff like that were kind of finicky however I do know that this actually does work and I have an example of it that I'll show you in just a moment all right so here's a quick example of the result that we can expect out of this process I have the actual 3d model of that statuette I took photos of and we can also take a look at the wireframe you can see that it's quite a dense model there's a lot of information there and I'm using currently a free version of sketchfab which means the site has limitations for how large the file can be that you upload I believe it's a 60 megabyte limitation I could be wrong on that but I do believe I definitely know that there is a limitation on the free account and I think there's even a limitation on the paid account as well just to keep their bandwidth within reason but you can see here that the statuette was actually recreated pretty faithfully it looks pretty believable and there's quite a bit of detail captured on that even though I didn't have the best lighting settings now of course with your projects I would highly recommend use the best lighting settings so you can get use a tripod and make sure you setup everything properly you know set that up ahead of time unfortunately I was a little strained on time when I did this but you can see here that it came out relatively well it captured some of this even kind of dainty detail at the top here with some of these feather looking things but a rather thin it captured them pretty well and it turned out quite alright so that's an example of what we can kind of expect here so here let's open up mushroom and I'm going to grab those photos from folder that I set up and I'm just going to drag them over here into this image sitting here at this image box and there we go we have all of our images inside of mushroom so if everything goes according to plan which for I I would say like 99% of all people who shoot with the camera phone or common phone or a common camera this will go without a hitch you simply drag your images in here and then you just press Start however before we press Start we should probably save it first so let's go file save as and I'm gonna find that folder so I'm gonna go to my photogrammetry folder here find my soldier and just name the soldier and it will save it as a mushroom graph file so a dot mg file and the reason we want to save that is so that when we start this mushroom is going to create a cache file and that's going to store all of your images it's going to store all of the object files that mushroom ends up creating where you saved it if you don't do that however mushroom will ask you to use a temporary file location and that will place it somewhere on your hard drive and you may have to fish for it and so to kind of avoid that we're simply just going to save the file ahead of time so we know where it is so if you're ready and you're happy with all your images if there are any images that you don't like say for example this one's a little too dark in the front you can right click and say remove or you can also find where that images by say show containing folder however I'm going to leave all these images here and then once you're happy with it just simply press start at the top and you'll notice we get this little moving bar that kind of shows the progress so the green is what's been completed in the yellow is what's being worked on and this kind of teal turquoise color is what is remaining and you can also see that represented down here in the nodes we'll see that the camera in it was successfully completed that we're working on feature extraction and the next process that we'll be worrying about is image matching and basically this will take some time generally speaking it goes relatively quickly and then we're going to get a bit of chug here at depth map this can sometimes take upwards of 15 minutes all the way to an hour and a half to two hours depending on the kind of hardware you have in your machine so expect to spend some time in this you can leave this in a background task for example go do something else work on something else if you want preferably something that's not super graphics card intensive if you can avoid that so that this has as much resource allocated to it as possible but essentially you can leave this running and do something else while you're waiting for it if you're in the lab I would say don't leave your computer unattended stay there maybe work on something written or read something if possible you can type up Word documents in the background stuff like that it's not a problem you can definitely do that so we're basically going to wait for this to finish processing and then we'll see the end result later on so I'm gonna cut the video short here and show you what it looks like when we get to the end there all right so I've gone ahead and cheated a little bit and loaded the old version of this file that I had just to avoid having to wait long amounts of time and you can see here that everything went off without a hitch we got all the way through this with a entire green bar and we can see that at the top I think to note that I've had in the past and it hasn't happened to me recently but in the past I've had issues with the depth map maybe it was my graphics driver or something that wasn't completely up-to-date but what would happen is I would get a part way through the depth map and it would hit an error and then it would stop processing and throw an error and as far as I know for that I think it was a graphics driver issue I wasn't too certain about it but essentially what would happen is it would it would build a percentage of the green bar and then it would throw a red section and essentially all I had to do was hit start again and the great thing about this is the cache will actually save all of that green progress and then when you hit the bar again if it crashes it will continue to build that progress and you won't have to worry about it as long as you can get through the depth map as long as it keeps progressing if you have an issue where it won't progress then you know leave a comment or try to reach out to somebody maybe search it online or talk to me in class of course I'm there to help you I've never run into that as an issue however if that is the case definitely reach out otherwise just continue to be patient with it hit the start button again let it build up that progress until it gets through the whole process here and then we get to the texturing stage and what you'll have is if we zoom in here just with the middle mouse button you can move the scene around by clicking and dragging your middle mouse button and because you're on a PC you probably have a three button Mouse but you don't that might be a little bit hard to navigate this but you'll see that we have what's called point cloud or dense cloud there's many different names for this if I click with the left mouse button I can kind of drag around this it's a kind of off orientation so I'll try to rotate it a little bit with some of these settings up here and maybe get it into place that's not the setting I want so your mouth we can kind of rotate it around in 3d space here and try to try to get it it kind of on the grid somehow that's probably as close as it's getting now we don't need to exactly perfect this this is just for the sake of being able to visualize it in the viewer because we are gonna take the mesh that's generated from here and bring it into blender you can also do so in whatever other 3d program that you choose to work with but essentially we get this point cloud data that's representative of the model and all this left to do is hit load model so I'm gonna do that it'll take a second to load through that so just bear just bear with it and then there it will generate the mesh and if we hit this little checkmark here next to sfm which I believe means structure from motion which we talked about a little bit in the intro to photogrammetry video now we can turn that off and you can see wow it's it's created the object and it's done so with pretty pretty good accuracy it looks pretty good I'm pretty satisfied with that and so now what we're going to do is it's already saved all of these folk of these files into your folder and all you have to do is go into that folder and bring those files into blender so I'll show you how to do that right now so once you're happy with this you can either go through it and save it again if you need to or simply close it I'm just going to come over here and bring you into the though so I already have a blender file setup with this so I'm just gonna open that really quickly all right so we've loaded in and you can see that I've gotten the file in here into blender and I cleaned it up a little bit just to make sure that everything was working well alright so let's imagine that this is not what you get in your scene and it's not going to be this way my blender is all customizing everything so I'm just going to quickly revert this to the factory settings and it's gonna be very different so this is what your blender is going to look like when you open it up for the first time and I'm gonna give you a quick introduction to the UI as well as how to navigate very quickly for those of you who don't if you are familiar with blender feel free to skip ahead in the video this is for my class students that have never used blender before and it can be quite intimidating but it's not that bad I promise I like using blender and a lot when I tell people that who have worked in the 3d industry they look at me like I have two heads it's perfectly normal ok so the first thing we have is we have a bunch of objects in our scene so this is like the default scene setting that we have for blender and this is the 3d view in the center on the Left we have a panel that's collapsible you can close that with the T key so we'll close that and then over here we have our our outliner I believe is what it's called yep and that's where all the objects in our scene resides so you can see we have three objects here we have a lamp we have a camera and a cube and then here we have our lamp our lamp our camera and our cube I don't like to have these things here I like to just delete them when I open up the scenes so what I'm gonna do is make sure my mouse is hovering inside of the 3d view I'm gonna tap the a key so that nothing is selected if you had anything selected that that's how you deselect everything and then you can tap it again to make sure that everything's selected and you can tell that you've done this successfully because things will be highlighted in orange and then what we can do is we can hit X and unfortunately I have some add-ons that I forgot to turn off so let me go sort that really quickly I apologize for that in advance some reason it's just excited this so I'm probably going to create problems for myself later on yeah so we'll just search it so the spacebar for me and then hit delete and then just object delete it okay now for you you can simply press the X key and it'll ask you if it's okay to delete those objects unfortunately some of my key bindings were a little out of whack because I have mesh machine installed on my iteration of blender that shouldn't be a problem for you okay so now that we have an empty scene you should know that selecting objects inside a blender by default is a little odd so in case you were wondering how that was done it's done with a right-click where every other piece of software uses the left click blender uses a right-click and you might be thinking to yourself well why in the world does it do that well if we go to the file menu and go to user preferences we can go to input and we can see all of the different settings that we have for blender so for example if you're familiar with 3d studio max or Maya you can actually emulate the way that those applications work inside of blender however we're just gonna stick with blender the reason why we get a select width right is because if we need to emulate a three-button mouse if I click left here you see that that option goes away and for those of you who are working on the max in my class you're gonna need this option because the Mac Mouse does not have a functional middle mouse button or at least some of them don't because they break and let that little ball in the middle of a mouse doesn't work so keep this option to select right and you can click emulate 3-button Mouse and that allows us to hold the Alt key in order to move around the scene so that's holding down the Alt key and left clicking on the mouse allows us to orbit around the scene holding down alt and shift and the left button on the mouse will allow us to pan around the scene and then if we hold down alt hold down shift and hold down ctrl I know it's it's a lot click and hold the left mouse button and you can zoom in and out of your scene now if you have a three button Mouse it's a lot easier all you have to do is hold down the middle mouse button to orbit hold down middle mouse button and shift in order to pan and then you can zoom by scrolling in your middle mouse button or scrolling in your middle mouse scroll wheel in order to zoom in and out but for those of you that don't have a three button Mouse you're going to want to use those settings that I just described feel free to rewind the video and review that as many times as possible now I like to leave this off and use left-click from my setup again use whatever you need to use you can also emulate a number pad in case you don't have one of those which will basically assign the functions of the number pad to the numbers at the top of your keyboard and essentially what that does is it allows you to switch the views so for example one is going to give you a front view three is going to give you a side view five is going to switch between perspective and orthographic as you can see here and we have a whole bunch of other views so for example seven is the top eight and six will give you nudging views or you can kind of nudge the camera the same with two and four will do the same thing but an opposite so there's many different ways that you can make stuff happen inside a blender I have a whole series on this if you're curious about that feel free to go and watch that and then carrying on we have a couple of other sections there are two more panels that I would like to go over so here we have all of our object properties for things that are seen so for example this is our render properties and then we have some render layers and some other tabs here that we're really not going to get into and then at the bottom we have a timeline for animation we don't need that at all in fact a lot of my tutorials begin with this entirely collapsed because I don't like using it and then there are two other panels that can be opened the N and the T panels I'd like to leave them closed if you want to reconfigure the interface of blender you can click and drag the in between some of these divisions it is a little weird to get used to this at first so for example collapsing a panel you'll see that there are score marks in the lower left and the upper right side of each of these panels there's even some at the top here this is your default file menu and you can control Z and undo stuff and ctrl shift to Z and redo stuff inside a blender that's all standard but essentially what we're going to do is we want to find this score mark here and click and drag down do not click and drag up at all otherwise you're gonna create you're either gonna collapse it up here or you're gonna create a new menu so we want to close this down if you click and drag up it'll create another menu and you can do this a bunch of times and I know a lot of people get confused creating like a thousand of these so just be careful about that click and drag down you'll see this little arrow up here and then you just do that as many times as you need to collapse so we can keep our workspace as clean as possible here I'm going to switch this over to cycles just to make sure that I'm using the correct render engine again this is not something that you need to be completely engaged with this gets a little bit deeper than we're going to go and again if you're really curious watch those videos that I put up and there's also a plethora of other educational material on this so now that I've spent a significant amount of time going over the blender interface let's import our object so I'm going to go file import wavefront obj obj I'm sorry about it wavefront obj this time it's in pre compiled for you is probably going to be inside soldier mushroom cache and texturing but for me I'm using my my pre compiled one so precompile soldier mushroom cache texturing and you'll find this big long name folder here and inside of that you will find a dot MTL and a dot obj file this is the file we're going to load into blender so just click on that and hit import obj and just wait it's gonna take a little bit of time it shouldn't take too too long but it will take a little bit of time so bear with it I'm gonna cut the video short and I'll see you in a second all right so it looks like our object came into blender without any problems and this is what it looks like so again zoom in with your middle mouse button hold down shift in middle mouse button in order to kind of move over to this again if you're using the right mouse button select scheme and you don't have a three button Mouse use the Alt key alt shift and alt shift control in order to get your zooming and your panning and your orbiting and essentially I want to make sure that I can see the object and we can see that it's kind of off-center here so we're gonna look at solving that so let's select it by clicking on it and you can see that it'll change from a dark orange highlight to a bright orange highlight and now we're gonna learn about moving our object in 3d space again this is mainly geared towards the newer students that have never used blender before so you'll see here that the object appeared here but we have this handle here and this just means that the origin for our object which is a point of reference for our object is appearing at the center of the world and it has a control around it so this is the transform widget or transform gizmo there's a billion different names for this thing but it's basically the handle that you use in order to move this thing around so you can see here that we've got three arrows we got a blue one a red one and a green one and these represent the three axes about which you can transform your object the blue one is the z-axis sometimes the blue and the green ones will be switched around different 3d applications in blender it's the z-axis for up and down the y axis for this direction and the x axis for this direction so here we can move it in this axis and this axis and in this axis I'm just going to hit ctrl Z to undo that and now what I want to do is I want to move this guy to the center of the world and you can see we have the intersection of the X and Y axis and I kind of want him existing there I'll kind of want to put his feet there so I'm basically just going to try to align the collision of these two axes on his feet all right so now what we can do is there are a bunch of other options down here if we hover over this we can see transformation manipulators we can also see a rotation manipulator as well as a trans trans sorry scaling manipulator I don't know why I said transform there so this is translating which is moving rotating which is self-explanatory and scaling which deals with size be careful not to scale it in one direction necessarily we can leave the scale as it is that's gonna be fine the only time we have to concern ourselves with the scale is when we go to 3d print this and for those of you who are doing that in the lab I would suggest consulting with the fine folks at rettner in order to have them help you make sure that you get the proper scale out of it I can show you how to set up scaling inside a blender if that's something you're interested in but I'll save that for specific cases and not spend too much time talking about it here alright so now that we have this at the center we're gonna hit the T key and open up our transform menu and we're gonna change set origin to origin to geometry and what that does is it puts this little dot here in the center of our geometry now you'll see this little floating thing here and you might wonder to yourself what that is and why it moves around when you left-click for me it's a right-click but for you it's probably a left-click and essentially what this is is the 3d cursor you can actually reset that by hitting shift C on the keyboard and you'll see it'll reset to the world origin which is again the collision of those two axes that we see here they're the X and Y axis and essentially what this does is when we create objects it will allow those objects to be spawned into the world from wherever this point is so if I move it here and I try to create something it'll create that object there now of course I don't I don't want everything to be relative to over there I want it in the center so again I'm going to hit shift C and return that to the center of the world now the reason why I wanted to do that is because I want the origin for this object to be down here not right here and so I'm going to go back to my set origin and I'm going to say origin to 3d cursor you could also use this and convoluted shortcut key here that's actually the way I prefer to do it just because I memorized it but you can also use this panel here just press that and you'll see that the orange origin for our object has jumped down here where we wanted it to be so now what that allows us to do is if we come down here and activate our rotation handle we can actually rotate our object about his feet so that we can get him in line with the grid so remember how I mentioned that you can activate the number pad keys on your keyboard in order to emulate them if you don't have them well if you do have the number pad keys or if you've emulated them what we want to do is go into a side view so we can more accurately line this up with the grid so I'm going to press the 3 key to get into a side view and it's gonna flip my camera because I didn't realize it but my entire objects upside down and I'm going to press the 5 key and what that's going to do is it's going to flatten out my view from a perspective view into an orthographic view and so now what I can do is I can rotate this character woops let's right-click to cancel that so if you if you create any transformations that you don't intend to keep like I'm doing here I clicked and it's moving this object around what you can do is you can right click and cancel that rotation or that translation or that scale and just bring it back to where it was before now one of the problems that I'm running into right now is because I'm in an orthographic view I can't actually see the handle for rotation the only handle that I can see is actually the rotation around the y-axis which is being lit up right now and I don't really want to well I can use that to get the statuette upright which is useful but then I can't actually rotate around any other axis except for maybe Z I can do that but I need the x axis in order to kind of fix the direction in which he's facing because you can see this is still skewed in this direction so one way we can do this is we can use the shortcut key are in order to create a rotation now because we're in our orthographic view the only rotation that's being affected right now is the axis that we're directly facing which is the x axis so if I use my middle mouse button or for those of you who are emulating alt and left mouse button you can actually tumble out of that and now you can see that there's the x axis it's finally appeared to us and we can see that handle there and control it in this way now the problem that this is going to raise is that if your camera view is not directly snapped onto the side like this so say we're kind of out of there if we hit the R key it's going to rotate based on our chem review so I would suggest using this option here just by clicking and dragging that or you can use the shortcut key R and then press Z in order to consider sorry not Z X to constrain the rotation to that axis and you can see that that red x-axis has actually lit up now that we're constraining our rotation to only that axis and that works with any of the other two axes as well so R and Z which is the mistake I made earlier you can see that now the z axis has shown up and that's what rotating around and our Y is now allowing us to rotate around the y axis so that's a very good way to get control of our object so now that it's in place I want to rotate it in the Z just a little more go to the front and make sure yeah that looks okay I'll hit the v key to go back into perspective and the T key to close it and now you can see that our statuette is in place I can reactivate the movement Patrol's and just kind of move this up a little bit and there we go I'm pretty happy with that so one interesting thing that we should make note of is we want to apply the transformations that we just created for it if I open up the n menu you can see here we have transformation data that we've created and if I were to zero all these out this object would go back to the original position that it was at I don't want to do that of course but we want to apply these so that they are zeroed out in the case that we need to do something to the mesh later on we can get a lot of distortion if we don't zero all that data out so the way that we do that is making sure that the mesh is selected again with that orange halo around it we can hit ctrl a and we can apply our location and you'll notice that all of this is now 0 we can do it again and say rotation and scale and then all of a sudden a rotation data is 0 and our scale is all set to 1 we didn't actually change the scale at all so that should have already been one but I like to apply that and then if you want to do it separately they do have separate options there as well so let's hit end to close that up and there we go we have our object if we switch our view viewport shading so that's down here by default it's set to solid we can also check the wireframe which is going to show us all of the messy topology that we have in topology is basically the surface quality of our object and then if I go to material you can actually see the material on this character or this object pretty cool so I'm going to do a little bit of cleanup on this so again I'm going to go into the side view and hit 5 so that's 3 and then 5 and now what I'm going to do is I'm going to switch from object mode into edit mode and this is going to take a second because there are a lot of points if we actually look up here we have 750 8,000 vertices which are all of these little points that make up this entire model so that's a lot and what I'm going to do is deselect everything by hitting a and then I'm going to hit Z which is the equivalent of coming down here and choosing wireframe and then what I'm going to do is I'm going to go select and then I need to find my border select which is the B key and I'm just going to click and drag up to here being careful not to select the floor in its entirety and you'll see we've selected all these points underneath it and I'm just going to hit X and save vertices unfortunately our menu has been corrected because we are in edit mode not object mode so keep in mind that based on the mode you're in you're going to get different options so be very very so be very careful and very attentive to what mode that you're in so right now we're in edit mode so I'm going to hit X and I'm going to delete these vertices and it'll take a second again because it's a really dense mesh and there we go we've cleaned up that bottom portion I'm gonna hit the one key now and that's going to switch us to the front view and what I want to do is again I can go select border select or I can hit the B key and you'll see I'll get this little crosshair I'm just gonna select this area and I'm gonna do the same to the other side somewhere around here probably would be fine and I'm gonna hit X and I'm going to delete these vertices just give it a second there it is and now I'm going to hit the seven key and that's going to give me a top view now this is gonna be a little bit tricky because there are so many vertices that it's hard to see the contour of our soldiers so we need to be somewhat conservative with how far we're willing to go into select otherwise we could end up selecting our soldier and deleting parts of him so I'm gonna hit B again and I'm gonna select right up to about here I think should be okay and then I'm gonna Pan my camera and I'm gonna do the same on the front half maybe around let's try here let's get it a little bit bold try there and to check this you can hit the one key and see if you've selected your soldier at all or you can tumble out of the view and hit the five key and it looks like we have preserved our soldiers so we don't have to worry about deleting any part of him and then we'll hit the X key and delete those vertices as well now you can see that my viewport is starting to chug a little bit of that has to do with the fact that I'm using screen recording software and of course it's just an insane amount of vertices we still have almost five hundred and sixty thousand vertices here so it's a lot of data for blender to handle so I'm gonna hit tab which is the same thing as moving back into object mode you can toggle between the two by hitting tab and that I'm going to switch back into our material mode right here and now you can see that things are a little bit faster a little bit easier to manage and there we go we've kind of cleaned up the ground underneath our our guy here and so it's a little bit easier to deal with now another way that we can clean this up and kind of reduce the poly count so when I say poly count I'm referring to these numbers up here we have vertices which are the points edges which are not accounted for in this menu right here which are the lines that connect the points and then the faces which are the connection of the points to form the surface so if I can show you this I can zoom in let's go into our solid mode here and if i zoom in far enough you can see that each of those points make up these triangles that form these little faces or form these surfaces and yeah that's what is referenced when we say faces so we've got a million plus faces here which is a lot and then the tries are so faces and tries can be the same thing but are not always the same thing the difference between that I can demonstrate really quickly if we take a plane I can actually show you we have the vertices which are in the corner of each of these and then the edges which are two vertices and then the whole face here is all four of these vertices connected now the difference between faces and tries is that we can actually connect this in the center and now we have two triangles so here we see that we have two faces which are two triangles however if we get rid of the center here plus let's undo that undo it to before I created that we have one face that has two triangles so that's essentially what those counts are referencing all faces are broken down into triangles once they're rendered by a render engine I know that might not mean much to you but that's essentially what that's relating to so now what I'll do is I'll just delete this because we don't need it if Italy okay there we go and so now we have our object if you wanted to 3d print this we would have to go through a little bit of legwork to get the bottom of it closed and I'll show you how to do that really quickly so we'll go into our material view for now I'm eventually gonna make it out of material view actually I'm gonna hit tab to go into edit mode from object mode and I'm gonna hit Z to go into wireframe and again this is really really difficult to navigate simply because of the fact that it's so dense so I'm gonna go and hit three and hit the v key so that I'm in orthographic zoom out I'm gonna hit the B key and then I'm going to select all of my soldier all the way down to his feet but I'm not going to select the ground so that we have all the soldier selected and then I'm going to hit select inverse and again this might be different depending on your subject material and now that I have the autumn selected I can hit X and say delete those vertices and it's going to take a second because again it's a lot of data and now I can kind of tumble out here we can hit the Z key in order to get back into our solid mode gonna keep zooming in here I'm gonna hit the five key so that we get into our perspective now there's a little trick that we have to do in order to close off the bottom here now one thing we could do is we could add a cube or a cylinder and we could just kind of attach those two objects to each other so the soldier to that cube or cylinder and I can show you how to do that however I just want to close this so what I'm gonna do is I'm going to change from our vertex mode which is what we're in right now we've been in that the whole time and I'm gonna switch to edge mode so there are three selection modes we have vertex edge and phase and what I'm gonna do is I'm going to select edge mode I'm going to hold down the Alt key and I'm going to select an edge on the very bottom of the soldier and I'm gonna do that twice so the first time you can see it's selected a small area the second time I clicked on that same edge it selected the whole thing and I'm just gonna hit the F key and what that's going to do is it's going to join all of those edges with one face on the bottom of the soldier and I'm just gonna drag this down a little bit using the X handle area I'm sorry the Z handle I keep confusing those two for some reason so the Z hand will is the blue one I'm just going to drag it down and you see that it's stretched a little bit and now I'm going to hit s Z zero so that's in order I'm gonna hit s then Z then zero and what that does is it flattens out the bottom of our soldier and now you can see it's closed which means we can 3d print it so as long as there are no problems with our mesh as long as it's watertight and what I mean by that is if you were to go inside like this and you were to fill it with water it wouldn't leak at all so long as it's watertight you should be able to 3d print it although there are some considerations with for example these little ear your ring looking things here those might need supports underneath it you may want to reorient him so he's laying down for example so if we rotated him like this that might be a little bit better for 3d printing again if you're one of my students who are thinking about 3d printing consult with the find folks inside of rettner and make sure that you get their blessing and their help in order to make sure that this goes off without a hitch so really quickly I'm going to change my origin to his feet so I'm going to hit tab into edit mode with this bottom face selected I'm going to hit shift s and that's going to snap to our selected surface so I'm going to say cursor to selected and you'll see the 3d cursor jumps up there I'll hit tab to go back out into object mode and again you can do that down here and I'm going to use that wild shortcut ctrl shift alt C and say origin the 3d cursor again if that's too much simply use the set origin here and say origin to 3d cursor and that's the T menu let's hit T and now that origin is set there and I can move this back down and I can actually turn on snapping which is over here snap transform and I can also turn on absolute grid alignment and I can move this so that it's snapped directly to the grid and he's standing directly on top of the grid and then again ctrl a we're going to apply our location our rotation and our scale and there we go we have our guide position directly on top of the grid if I go back into our material mode we can see it's looking pretty good you'll see that there is a bit of a weird texture thing going on the bottom the reason why this is happening is because we created that face and so blender doesn't really know what part of the texture or the image that is being projected onto this should be mapped to the bottom now fortunately for us we're not really going to see this if we 3d print it or if we upload it online you might see it a good way to hide that is hitting shift C to reset our 3d cursor we can add in a box and we can scale it so that's s Z to scale it in the z direction and we can move it down hit s to scale it some more I'm gonna turn off my snapping and move this down here so you can hide it this way if you really want to you can also create a cylinder or any number of other things to put underneath it and there we go we don't have to worry about seeing that underneath um if you wanted to correct that I could teach you how to do that if you're one of my students in class or if you're really curious I leave a comment down below and ask me about it and I could show that off however I don't want to waste too much time on that it gets a little more technical talking about you know UV maps and texture projection and all sorts of fun stuff like that now you might be wondering where is this this texture coming from and I can actually show that to you if we open up our mesh room file that we saved before inside of the cache so we'll open that up go to texturing which is if you remember that's where our files are soul stored that's where our files are stored I get so tongue-twisted sometimes all right and then we'll open this up you'll see that we have an MCL and obj and there's also a texture image in here which was created in mushroom which is where we're getting this texture from I'll just collapse that and if I open that up you can see here is all the texture for that solider and it's broken up and laid out in a very incomprehensible way but the cool thing about this is with this MTL file when we import it into blender it's actually able to read it in a way that makes sense to us visually so it's it's an interesting way of how mushroom compiles textures that can be projected onto a mesh and read in a way that is sensible to us but if we were to try to understand the layout of it or anything like that it just seems like a big mess and there are ways to correct this and go about it that are well beyond the scope of this course but I figured I would mention it in case anyone was curious alright so once we're happy with this we can of course go file and save as and save this as a blend file and we can upload it online we can also export it so file export and we can export it as an obj file which we can then hand off to a 3d printer if they accept OBJ's we can also use an STL which is a very common 3d printing file extension and then we also have an FBX and Colada those are other kind of familiar extensions their 3d S is another really common one but for 3d printing you're most more than likely going to go with an STL again ask your printer what they accept and what they are expecting from you and that's one way to do it now before I draw this to a close I'm gonna get rid of this squished cube down here and I'm gonna talk about optimizing the smush a little bit because as you can imagine four hundred and thirty nine thousand vertices and eight hundred and seventy seven thousand faces is a bit of data still it's still quite a bit and as I mentioned previously uploading this to sketchfab there is I believe a sixty megabyte upload limit on a free account and even the pro accounts that you have to pay for still have some sort of limitation in order to keep their bandwidth within a reasonable quota so in order to optimize this a little bit to get our file size down a little bit smaller there are some things that we can do so once we have the mesh selected we have to find this tab over here with the wrench and we can add some modifiers so the number one modifier that will make photogrametry a little less dense and a little more manageable is the decimate modifier so if we hit add modifier and find decimate and add that you can see that we get this a decimate modifier that uses a ratio to reduce the number of vertices and thus edges tries and faces in order to keep it a little bit lower but it will do its best to preserve the outside surface of the model so that way we don't have to worry about it collapsing or having problems now there are limitations to this and we're gonna see this really quickly so change the ratio ratio from one to say 0.5 and hit enter and you'll notice that it will kind of lag for a second and that's again because it's trying to process through all nearly 500-thousand of these vertices and so give it a second we'll get our little a little ring of death of waiting and there we go it's finally finished and you can see now we have two hundred and nineteen thousand instead of the four hundred thousand that we were previously at and it looks relatively the same so you can really push this ratio you can go as low as 0.01 however the lower you go the more that's going to decimate and it can run into additional problems and we might see that when this updates so now that it's updated you can see that if i zoom in here some of the texture is starting to become a little bit muddy you can see that there are these weird little fractures that are occurring and this is because blender is reducing the number of polygons but it's trying to preserve the surface quality and it's not really understanding how that texture needs to be mapped across all of this at this point so like I said there are some limitations to this now we're down at about 4,000 vertices which is quite optimized if I hit the z key you can see that it's a lot less dense we can actually start to see through the mesh now you can see nearly all of the vertices that comprise it and so this becomes a little bit easier to look at and easier to make sense of it's a little bit faster to work with however we are losing some of that surface quality so this is something that would be alright for 3d printing it would be again it would be a little bit Jaggi you would definitely get some of these results here but for the most part all of the large forms are still being preserved by blender it still reads as a simplified version of that very dense model that we had before now this for example wouldn't necessarily be bad to use inside of a game engine as long as you projected the higher quality details onto this lower quality proxy meshes as it's often called however you may want to preserve some of that higher level detail so maybe point 0 1 is going a bit far you could try maybe 0.5 and see if that helps us to retain some of that detail so we'll let it run through that really quickly and see what kind of result it returns so there we've gotten quite a lot of that detail back we're up at 200,000 faces adverts and 400,000 faces and you can see that it's kind of rough in its surface but we're getting a lot more of that detail back we can see that there's something in these hands we can see that there are some striations across this chest piece and the differences between these individual feathers if I turn the material back on just wait for it to load back up again it's trying to load all the information on account of the decimate modifier and we can actually apply this to speed things up later now you can see that we're not getting as much of that jagged as we had before we still have a lot of faces but we are kind of compromising here so maybe if I point put this at point one instead of point zero one I think that'll be our last value here I think that would be a good compromise so point one hit enter and there we go so we have now a little bit of jaggedness that's appearing here on the model it's really not that bad some of it is not even noticeable when we zoomed out this far so again this sort of thing you can you can really push it based on how far away the object is going to be viewed at however it's not really bad in this case we can still see some of the patterning that's even occurring here but there we go I think that's a decent compromise we have forty-three thousand verts which are 87,000 faces that's not awful it'll definitely run inside of sketchfab we're still getting that problem on the bottom but again you can hide that if necessary or you can actually apply a completely separate material to this to make it black or you know a dark green that kind of relates to this object and there we go we have our our model here so if I switch back into our wireframe mode again hitting the z key we're coming down here and going to wireframe you can see that we can still see through it it is a bit quite a bit more dense than what we had before I can hit Z again and you can see here that we still have a decent surface quality that has enough detail if you were to 3d print this this would definitely show a lot of detail especially if you use a really nice 3d printer so if we're happy with that make sure we're in object mode and we can hit apply and it will apply that modifier it takes a second to load again because it's rifling through all those vertices and applying all the changes and before applying this I would probably save the file as an uncompressed version and then save another one where it's decimated so you could say original and decimated it's completely up to you again you have that original file from mesh room but we had to do all those transformations to it but there we go we have our decimated model another modifier you could put on it is the smooth modifier so that would be over here and this basically smoothes it out by a certain percentage so 50% of it will be smooth or a little prop it'll apply 50% smoothing one time which is what this repeat factor is if we want to smooth it out a lot we can turn that up to 20 and you can see it gets really smooth that might be a little too much so let's try 10 maybe that looks fine maybe even 5 that looks ok so somewhere between 5 and 10 would be good I think I'm going to leave it at 5 to kind of preserve that detail and then I'm gonna apply that as well again save a version before you apply your modifiers and then after you apply your modifiers you can also add the smooth before the decimate or after the decimate it's up to how you want to handle it sometimes modifier order is going to matter sometimes it doesn't matter as much but just keep that in mind so let's activate our material mode and there we go we have our soldier he's looking rather good his silhouette reads pretty well it's been simplified enough that we can definitely do stuff with it but it's not causing our application to slow down and there we have it we have our 3d photogrammetry model taken out of mesh room we've walked through the interface of blender and kind of shuffled around through getting it in the proper orientation and then we've decimated it and smoothed it in order to bring it to an acceptable state and now all you have to do is you can save it as a blend file an obj or an STL you can hand off the obj or STL to a 3d printer now keep in mind most 3d printers are not going to make use of texture data so it's probably going to come out more in the solid view like this and that's what your 3d print will look like and that would be pretty cool but if you upload it online to sketchfab which I have a video of uploading files to sketchfab feel free to check that out and or if people really need it I can show this specific model but essentially you can save the blend file so file save as save it as a Mon file go create your free sketchfab account if you don't have one or just log into it upload the blend file and then in the 3d settings find your material settings and you may have to come back here and upload this texture underscore 0 PNG and apply that to the object now depending on the size of your object mushroom may create more than one of these in which case you'll have to upload them both and map them both to the object if you watch the video that I've uploaded already on this process it's pretty easy to figure out otherwise ask me for help ask in the comments below and I will be more than happy to help you sort that out so I just want to say thank you for bearing with me through this process I hope everybody learned something and that it was useful to you again if you have any concerns or questions or comments leave them down below or approach me in class or get a hold of me however you know I'm on all the social media and everything and I hope everybody has a great project and I'm looking forward to seeing what my class comes up with and if anyone else wants to send me work feel free and I hope you have a great day and I'll catch you next time

Channel: Crompwell

Views: 114,792

Keywords: mesh, photo, photogrammetry, scan, visual, art, design, learn, education, tutorial, graphic, VFX, effect, free, open, source, blender, 3D, statue, real, time

Id: RmMDFydHeso

Length: 60min 37sec (3637 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 14 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/SR-71A_Blackbird]

You have to make your own CAD model from the points if that's what you want. The 3D mesh in STL format can be used to create tool paths for CNC equipment or a 3D printer. You can essentially use this software to make a 3D copy of some object.

[u/Branch3s]

There’s also files on thingiverse for a “$3.47 (may be wrong about the number) 3D scanner” it’s a turn table with a crank that works in conjunction with an iPhone and the standard headphones to take pictures at intervals

[u/santaclaws351]

Isn’t this what they used in the most recent COD to make the super realistic weapon renderings?