Photogrammetry Survival Guide | Free & Easy | For 3D Printing | Art & Game Assets | Phone or Camera

let's turn just about anything into an art  asset game asset or even a 3d print using   the free and open source power of photogrammetry  this video aims to be a one-stop shop to really   get a running start with photogrammetry i'm amazed  that more people aren't using photogrammetry for   absolutely everything and that's the purpose of  this video i want to show you the entire workflow   this is a combination of over a year of learning  in my part and it's going to cover everything   3d printing art assets game assets it's all in  this video meaning that it's quite a big video   now it's sectioned out pretty easy the first one  is all about getting photogrammetries themselves   the photo taking the objects you use and all  that then we've got the actual photogrammetry   and how to get a photogrammetry end result then  we have 3d printing workflow then we have the   asset workflow then we have some extra hints and  tips right at the end with that all said what's up   i'm jonathan and welcome to maker tales where i'm  showing my maker journey to help you go further in   yours if you enjoyed this video and you find it  useful i'd really appreciate it if you give it a   thumbs up this video is sponsored by renderro just  in case you don't know what photogrammetry is in   a nutshell it's where you take a whole bunch of  photos and using some silicon magic it spits out   a 3d textured model to start off let's talk about  what exactly you can take a photogrammetry of the   short answer is almost anything that being said  the more reflective or transparent something is   the harder it's going to get to the point that  it's almost impossible but we'll talk more   about these impossible cases near the end of the  video also remember not to limit yourself to only   objects you can do photogrammetries of spaces like  rooms buildings and environments now when it comes   to taking photos you can get as complicated or  as simple as you like you can do this indoors or   outdoors but i find i get my best results outdoors  on an overcast day as we're doing our best to get   rid of any shadows so be sure that there's no  harsh light a simple test for shadows is to wave   your hand about 30 centimeters above your other  hand and see if there are any noticeable shadows   lastly if you really want to get involved about  lighting and create as much of a diffuse light   setup as possible pair up an overcast day with a  few lights now this is really not needed unless   you're really trying to create some amazing  digital assets i usually skip the lights now   when it comes to holding the object you're about  to do a photogrammetry of it's best to raise it up   in some way be it with a toilet roll an egg cup  or a stack of magnets what we are trying to do   here is remove the bottom shadow of the ground  and give ourselves a greater visibility of the   overall object also be sure that however it's  held up it does not move around or have a chance   of falling off easily halfway through taking  the photos as you cannot move your object while   you're taking your photos if the object moves for  whatever reason you have to start from scratch   plus try your best not to cast any shadows on  it while you're taking photos as we're trying to   do our best to keep the lighting as consistent as  possible of course for spaces and larger objects a   lot of this is just not possible now i'm sure some  of you are wondering how can i do this in a studio   with a white background well the short answer is  you don't it's more of a pain than it's worth and   the software we're using in this video actually  needs the background to create some stunning   results now when it comes to actually taking  your photos you can use pretty much anything be   it your phone or a bigger camera just to show you  here on the left you see the results from a phone   and here on the right you see them from a camera  both of them are done with 100 images if you're   using your phone make sure you're using something  like a pro mode or an app that lets you lock   down all your camera settings as they need to not  change while you're taking all your photos and if   you're using a camera make sure you are in manual  and crank up that f-stop as we really need to keep   as much of the object in focus finally it comes  to the point of actually taking your photos i find   that the easiest way of thinking of it is to put  yourself in the perspective of a computer i know   it's a little bit weird but here it is the mindset  to keep as a computer unless you take a picture   of it i don't know it exists and on top of that  if there isn't another photo that significantly   overlaps the one that you've just shown me by 40  or 60 then i don't know where it exists so keeping   that in mind it's time to start taking photos  a lot of photos at a minimum i would recommend   75 but in all honesty i find i get my best results  at about 100 to 150 photos for something that i   can hold in my hands 200 to 400 for something  about the size of the average adult and just go   crazy for anything bigger the overall rule is that  it's better to overshoot and not use images than   undershoot and wish you took more now yes i know  that is a lot of photos but trust me it goes a lot   faster than you think and i only go into the  hundreds because i really like to keep the details   in my photogrammetries with time you'll learn  the level of detail that you're happy with and   start to see the correlation between the number  of photos that you take and the detail that you   get out lastly as long as you keep the computer  mindset while taking your photos there are no real   rules to what distance you should stay at you can  even take close-ups of parts that you would like   to have extra definition and if you really want  to push the envelope and risk it a little you can   even use multiple different cameras and lenses  but this might affect the overall color of the   final texture if you care about that as you can  see i usually work my way around in full circles   changing my angle of capture after every full  circle once i've gone around a few times i then   focus on the detail and the awkward to reach spots  now if you're interested in following along or you   don't have the best weather to do photogrammetry  right now down in the description i have a few   different photogrammetry image sets free for you  to download to get making right now and now that   you have a lovely set of photogrammetry images  be it provided by me or that you have taken let's   look at the program we'll be using which is mesh  room by alice vision if you haven't heard about   mesh room you're about to be blown away completely  free and open source bit of software here that   does so much more than just photogrammetry i  strongly suggest you go here and check it out   we're gonna go to try mesh room now and straight  away on their download page you're going to see   there isn't a mac version don't worry mac users  you can use what i use which is rendero this   video sponsor or you can give it a go trying  to use google colab now i haven't done this   it's quite an involved method it's linked down in  the description with that link as well as a video   and lastly for everyone you need a nvidia cuda  enabled gpu to run this version of mesh room   with that said as it's open source someone has  created a branch that doesn't need this and that   is also linked down in the description now just  before you download the version of mushroom that   you'll be using hear me out i want to talk about  this video sponsor rendero rendero is a cloud   computer literally a desktop in the cloud and it's  incredible just to give you an idea i'm actually   using it right this minute for this video and i  have zero lag and i'm in the middle of nowhere   in scotland so you can imagine you're gonna have  a pretty good connection too they're pushing very   hard to creatives because they know that we use  a lot of power and we need a scalable workstation   and that's exactly what they're providing here  their pricing is extremely reasonable as well   it's only $49 a month that's about $1.60 a day and  that gives you free basic power so they charge $49   for one terabyte of space and then the basic power  you basically have to pay per hour but with this   tier right here you get almost as much as you  can use for free now if you're only going to   be doing one or two photogrammetries still check  out this seven day trial for seven dollars because   the main reason i've paired up with rendero  for this video is well when you're doing a   photogrammetry your computer is going to be a  potato because the cpu will be at 100 and you   will not be able to use your computer whatsoever  i truly warn you about that your computer will be   a potato for maybe a couple of hours or a day or  two depending on the size of your photogrammetry   with that said if you want to use rendero there is  a link down in the description and it really helps   out maker tales obviously i'm using rendero right  now so i'm going to download this windows version   i'm going to click it downloads download start  it that's going to take a second or two because   i'm using rendero and i'm a server so that  means i get three gigabit upload and download with my file now obviously downloaded what you're  going to get is a zip folder and you just have   to unzip it and you get this folder this folder  you can put it anywhere you want i put it in my   documents inside of here there's this application  i've right clicked it and put send to my desktop   to create a little shortcut or you can just double  click the application and this will run meshroom   for the first time now i completely understand the  first time you open up mushroom it can look very   overwhelming and a little bit alien especially if  you've never worked with a node structure before   but trust me this is a lot simpler than it looks  and i find that the easiest way of learning this   is by just actually doing it and we're going to  do exactly that by bringing in our photogrammetry   image set right here to where it says drop image  files it's as simple as drag and dropping it   in there now meshroom has many different  ways of creating photogrammetries there's   something called live reconstruction there's  also something called augmented reconstruction   well basically i'm going to be showing you the way  that i find 99% of the time i use photogrammetry if   you want to find out about augmented as well as  live i will put links down in the description so   you can find out more about them now with our  images in mushroom's ui is already starting to   become a lot more self-explanatory right here you  get a whole bunch of thumbnails of all the images   that you've imported into mushroom and this here  is obviously an image viewer the last bits of the   ui is a 3d viewer which we'll talk about later and  down here the graph editor will talk about that in   just a moment however right now i think would  be a great point to talk about how many images   you actually need for photogrammetry i would say  that the minimum is about 50. i find that if i go   less than 50 i just got a whole bunch of failed  photogrammetry attempts and that is just very   annoying just so you get an idea here's a side  by side of the 50 images and 100 images there's   not that much of a difference but the bigger the  object is the bigger the difference they'll be   the 50 images only took 1 hour and 15 minutes  yet the 100 images took 4 hours and 15 minutes   and this was all done within renderro's basic plan  so imagine 100 images for this tiny tiny little   ammonite right here and trust me it would not  surprise me with some bigger models or bigger   spaces that you go into 150 200 or even 400 images  and i have heard it many times of people leaving   mushroom to run for days so really take a look  at renderro because it's so worth it to still   have access to your normal computer while  the photogrammetry is being computed up in   the cloud it is brilliant with that all said the  most important step right this minute is to save   what we've just started so i'm going to go here to  file save as i'm going to save mine right here but   do keep in mind wherever you save this you need a  lot of space and i am talking about a lot of space   this one little project of 102 images it's gonna  use up 10 gigabytes of space because the mesh   room cache files are huge i have other projects of  around 200 or so images that go all the way up to   48 gigabytes so just be aware of that giant space  requirement for mesh rooms cache at this point   you have a decision to make you could press that  very big green start button up at the top that's   very tempting and i strongly would not recommend  this because as i've just said you'll be waiting   four hours for the outcome of this and well if  you press that green button you will have no   idea what is going to come out at the other end  if you follow this workflow though i will show   you how you get to see glimpses and refine what  exactly is going to be coming out right at the end   so we're going to be working in the graph editor  so we need to understand how to move around in it   well to move around you can use your scroll wheel  to zoom in and out hold down the middle mouse   button to pan around and if you don't have that  you can hold down shift hold down the left click   and that lets you move around as well i don't know  how to zoom in without a middle mouse button so   maybe take a look online maybe you can use gesture  on a laptop if you get yourself completely lost   just press this fit all and that will fit it  all onto the screen like this now lastly before   we dive into this we need to know a little bit  more of what exactly is going on down here now   we don't need to know it in great detail but a  nice little overview would be fantastic and you   get exactly that here on the alice vision website  go to photogrammetry and here it really starts   to explain to you what exactly is happening what  it's looking for and so much more i really would   suggest reading that now that you know how to find  out more information about the nodes the one i   want to show you is structure from motion we want  to compute up to this point because it's a very   important node it creates something called a point  cloud for us as well as all the virtual cameras   of where we took our photos for our photogrammetry  set to get this to compute up to this point select   it right click it and select compute at this point  it basically just cues up all the processes up   to this point right here as you can see green is  already processed orange is currently processing   blue is going to be processed and you do get  these as well so if i press stop right this minute   this magenta means that it's stopped you also  get red and red basically means that there's   an error usually i find that the error is that the  cache has been corrupted in some way shape or form   so go into the cache files and i'll show that  later on in this video delete them and just try   and do this again to start this up once again it's  literally just open it up right click compute and   let this go at this point the potatoing of your  computer begins just to show you i'll open up   the task manager here inside of rendero and you  will see that we are going to be at close to 100   cpu right this moment there you have it  this is the official potatoing of your   computer now just to let you know in rough time  estimations this here for this set of 102 images   is going to take around about one hour to  compute inside of renderro's basic plan with   that said what i'm going to do is i'll leave  this running and then i'll come back to you   once we're at a point that this is finished with  our structure from motion now computed let's take   a look at what exactly is created here now  i like to make this a little bit bigger so   i really get to see what i'm working with and  to move around in the space it's pretty simple   you use your scroll wheel to zoom in hold down  your middle mouse button to pan around and   this sort of trackball thing is what's the main  origin point of where you're rotating by rotating   you hold down the left click and that lets you  rotate so you basically just need to go by eye   to about there or you can double click and that  sort of snaps it into place to one of the points   first thing we should do here is just take a look  at all the cameras see that that looks about right   it does so what i want to do is now hide  them by just dragging that all the way down   now i no longer really need my trackball i'll  move this just a little bit more that way   check this is really nicely on my ammonite right  there but once i have that in place i'm going to   hide my trap ball and hide my grid now if you  get yourself completely lost and you have no   idea what to do all you have to do is click right  click reset view that puts you back to where you   were right at the beginning or go fit all and  it fits absolutely everything on the screen   now with that all said let's get ourselves back  to our ammonite there so that we can really   observe it pretty well and double check that it is  exactly as we're expecting so i like to get myself   nice and close to the final object that i'm trying  to export as a photogrammetry i will turn off my   trackball now i will make the points smaller  to really be able to see what i'm making here   and you know what this is exactly it right  here this is letting me know that this overall   is going to come out how i expect it to come  out now the next point is a real hard hitter   it is the depth map we're going to go to it right  click hit compute and this takes around about   two hours using renderro's basic plan which is not  a soft computer so be aware that this is one of   the big chunks right this minute that you're going  to have to compute i'll come back once that's done   now with the depth map completed it's time to  get to the magical point of meshing before you   go and do the computing up to meshing we need  to very much set up a custom bounding box if not   we're going to compute all of this extra data  that we really do not need so all we have to do   is select this bounding box and if you don't  see it double click it and then it'll pop up   it's usually pretty big within the scene  and all you have to do is use these little   gizmo controls to move this to the  correct point that you're looking for   so for me it's something around there and  then once you've moved it to the right spot   go and use these little scale points to  scale this down to the right size for you now i'm quite happy with how my bounding  box is right this minute and i only have   one main bit of photogrammetry geometry that  i want to take out from here so i can actually   just jump straight over to texturing now the  main reason why i'm saying that is here on   mesh filtering there is a setting which is keep  only the largest mesh if your photogrammetry has   more than one mesh so things that are floating  around in the air you might not want to click   this but for me obviously i do want to click this  i'm going to turn this on and i'm going to compute   all of these all the way up to texturing one last  thing here in texturing you can change this to a   different texture size many people like to use  4k i quite enjoy 8k it's just because i like to   look at pretty images even though i don't use it  within 3d printing for 3d printing you very much   need to compute just up to meshing but texturing  is pretty cool to have anyway because it does not   take that long and in fact all of these right here  when we set them to compute is only going to take   around about 45 minutes and that's using again  renderro's basic processing and for those of you   who are making art or game assets you might want  to change your unwrapping method to lscm i'm quite   fine with basic and i'll show you how i create  assets using the basic one now with all that said   let's right click and compute and i'll see you  with the end result with everything now computed   we can finally see what we've created now it might  not be inherently obvious exactly what's going on   here right this minute but trust me all you have  to do is double click text string to make sure the   text string comes up here then all you have to  do is hide all of these right here once you've   hid all of those you will see your lovely final  photogrammetry created and it will usually blow   your way just how great it comes out for those of  you that are doing 3d printing and only went up to   mesh filtering what you'll basically have is your  mesh filter which will look something like this   now you might be wondering where on earth is this  the quickest way to get there just go right click   open folder the other answer to this is wherever  you have saved your file there is a mesh room   cache and this is what i was talking about right  at the beginning when i said when things go wrong   you have to go in here and delete things so  go into here and you'll see that every single   operation has a nice little folder to it so when  something goes wrong go to that folder delete it   and try it again if things carry on going wrong  there is a wiki and a manual and that is linked   down in the description for those of you doing 3d  printing that only went to mesh filtering go into   your mesh filtering open that file and you'll  see there's a dot obj in there and for those of   you that went all the way to texturing well you  will have a file in here you open that up and you   have your obj in there so now let's open this up  within blender now as a very quick note for those   of you that don't know what blender is this is a  completely free and open source tool that does so   much from video editing to 3d modeling to visual  effects you name it it does it it's incredible but   i understand that's quite a big pill to swallow  but don't worry i have an entire free course that   goes through all the theory of how to use blender  through precision modeling now this is a pure   theory course and you will learn pretty much how  to use blender very deeply but i understand it's   not the most enjoyable way of learning if you want  to learn through projects i'm currently working   on a course that will come out real soon and you  can check down in the description to see if it's   already out sign up to the updates and i'll let  you know as soon as that's out now with that all   said let's jump into blender and see what we've  created in detail now in blender let's import our   final result i'm going to go pretty quick here  because i would expect that you know blender   and if you don't know blender i just pointed you  towards my course we go to file import and obj   here you just need to go to where you saved your  file so for me it's right here inside of my fossil   video capture mesh room texturing so if you didn't  do texturing it's inside of mesh filtering and   i'm just going to open this up it can take a  little bit because this is around 600 000 faces   as i have my blender set up in millimeters it  comes in really small but don't worry about   it it's still all here so you can see it's  coming brilliantly and it's really great i'm   just going to quickly get this to a scale  that i quite like and put it in the center   for those of you doing game assets don't worry  you don't really have to do this right now so this here is my final end result of texturing  it's actually an extremely clean model and i'm   really happy with this you can see if we click on  the texturing it comes in with all the textures as   well because it pulls it from the mtl file i think  that's this file structure now the very quick and   dirty way of cleaning this up right this minute  is basically to do a modify decimate so i'm just   going to do that right this minute we're going to  go into our modifiers add a decimate right here   i'm going to crank this all the way down to maybe  a 0.2 and here we have it we've decimated down   to 0.2 and you can see we've removed quite a few  we had 600 000 now this is just the point where   were still you have a decent amount of resolution  but we haven't lost too much now i would not   recommend this workflow at all but it can work for  those of you that come with holes and all over the   place with your photogrammetry well there's a lot  of stuff to learn within blender and i all i can   really say is go check out my course it's free  it's there and it has all the information for you   if not this video would be three hours long and  if you're having a really problematic mesh or   you don't want to deal with blender at all use an  online service like make printable they basically   repair meshes really quickly and they have  a lovely little blender add-on but of course   you do have to pay per download using their  online surface now as for the best workflow   here's what i want to talk to you about  it's called instant meshes and i kid you not   this is absolute witchcraft the link is down in  the description and all you have to do is come   down here to where it says pre-compiled binaries  download the one for you for me it's obviously   windows this will download a zip which you just  extract and you'll have an exe in it i'm going   to put this on my desktop right here because i'm  going to be using this from now on we'll close   this little window double click it and that will  start instant meshes in a nutshell instant meshes   is a quad re-topologizing program that does some  incredible stuff for those of you doing video game   assets this is the point for you to skip ahead  because what i'm going to do here is we're going   to first edit it up for 3d printing so with 3d  printing in mind let's open up our obj once again   i'm going to go with my texturing result here  i'll double click and click on my obj this   now takes just a little moment you have to  wait for instant meshes to basically open up   and here you'll have your obj ready and this  is really simple we're wanting to keep a decent   amount of resolution in here so i'm going to crank  this up to maybe 100k it's going to give you a   little bit of a warning saying hey you're going  to need to subdivide to be able to get that type   of resolution just click ok and give it a chance  to compute now with that done all you have to do   is click solve and solve if you're interested in  learning more about the topology side of things   there's a lot to do with that and you'll find out  more in the asset building side of this video so   we'll click solve once this brings up this entire  mesh sort of thing so click solve again and this   gives you an idea of what the mesh will actually  look like once it comes out you know what i'm   pretty happy with this to start with so i'll just  leave that as it is and we'll go to export mesh   we click extract mesh and this will literally  create the mesh from what we've just done there   and now we're just going to save it i'm going  to save it to the desktop as 3d print mesh   make sure that you add the extension dot obj  when you save now back in blender i'm just going   to hide our original mesh and import the new  mesh that we just created from instant meshes once again it comes in pretty small so i'm just  going to zoom right into it and all i'm going to   do is i'm going to right click go origin geometry  to origin to move my geometry to the origin point   then i'll press 1 on my number pad rotate this  round to the correct orientation press 3 on   my number pad rotate this round to the correct  orientation then i'll apply the rotation itself   i will change the scale up here because i want  this one to actually be 58 millimeters high and   this will give me the correct scaling that i can  copy and paste into the rest of my scale here   now with that done i'm going to see this in full  once again i will apply the scale and now with   the scale applied i'm just going to move this  up a little bit here i'm going to do some very   quick boolean here because obviously this isn't  exactly great for 3d printing right this minute   i'll import in a plane i'll scale that up a little  bit i'll then go into edit mode and i will extrude   this down by 10 millimeters and then i'll just  do a nice little boolean cut of this to this   go ctrl shift minus and i know if you do not  understand what i'm saying right this minute   it's all explained to my course and it's  completely free so just go check it out   and there we have it what i want to do is i'm  going to export this out and take a look inside   of our slicer so select it go file export stl and  let's take a look at it inside of prusa slicer and here's our mesh inside of our slicer it's  come out absolutely brilliant of course you can   have this much higher resolution if you want  all you have to do is inside of instant meshes   just crank up that number till you're happy with  the end result resolution with it now sliced we   can see that it's come out absolutely perfect and  this is exactly the end result that we're looking   for and this here is the 3d print itself i am  really happy with it now let's talk about the   art and game asset workflow for photogrammetry  and if you're not interested in that remember   that straight after this section we do have some  more bonus information that applies to everyone   for the asset creating workflow it starts instant  meshes let's open up our mesh i'm going to open up   my textured mesh i'll double click that and then  i just give instant messages just a moment to open   it up now with our high res mesh in here we know  how important it is to get this into a low count   for our games and art assets so let's just crank  this down to a number that we're quite happy with   i'm gonna go with 1.9 k now i'm going to click  solve now what this does it creates this matrix   so to speak of what exactly it's going to  look like wherever there's a crossing here   it's basically going to be a cross point now i  want to sort of move around the quads a bit here   so i want to get this comb looking thing and  just follow a spiral all the way around this once i let go it gives a whole bunch of  information that now it's computing and   it can take a hot minute or two you can  see that new solve now has this sort of   flowing effect i've got to do this  to the other side to rotate around   turn off the comb then rotate around  and i'll do the same on this side now there's a lot more information and a lot  more that you can do inside of instant meshes   but i'm going to keep this very top level right  now i'm just going to click solve to make sure   it's all solved how we want it then i'm going to  click the next solve here which starts to create   the mesh itself and as you see we've created  some very nice low poly mesh here you could go   even less if you really wanted now let's extract  the mesh so i'll click extract extracting mesh   and some people like to turn this up to one when  it comes to making low poly meshes i'm going to   leave this actually you know what i am i'm going  to go up to one here i'm going to extract this   mesh now and here we have our low poly mesh of our  photogrammetry now i'm going to go and save this   onto my desktop as low poly dot obj and be sure  that you add the dot obj starting this all off   in a nice fresh blender file i'm gonna change my  unit scale back to one because i usually work in   millimeters but when we're doing art assets it's  best to work with a one scale here so i'm going to   import both the low res and the high res now and  do not move them from where they get imported in with both of these now imported i'm just going to  quickly rename this one to high res and then i'm   going to save my file now that everything is saved  and safe let's take a good look at what's going   on right here we have both of these meshes right  on top of each other and this is exactly what   we're wanting we're going to bake the textures and  the normals from one to another now this doesn't   really help for baking though right this minute  because you can see they're quite intersecting   let's grab the low poly and let's go shift D  create a copy right click to cancel the movement   let's hide the low poly one and rename this one  as cage now what we're gonna do it's very simple   we're gonna go into edit mode select everything  here and edge selection because you can see   we have a whole bunch of seams here so let's  right click and go clear sharp so that clears   everything with everything selected now in face  mode i'm going to go alt s to start to scale up   now if it goes scaling up too quickly hold down  shift and that will bring scale up just slowly now   what we're doing is trying to get to the point  where it no longer intersects too much now i'm   going to be cutting off that bit there so that  doesn't really matter again i'm going to go alt   s scale that up to the point that it feels that  all of this is no longer intersecting there's   one more intersection point here let's carry on  scaling that up right to about there anything   that's important here nope that is looking good  and we can always just clean that up down there   later so with that done i'm going to press save  with our cage created i'm going to go right click   and shade this flat just to take a good look at  it i'm then going to hide the cage hide the high   res and show the low poly i'm going to make  sure that the low poly as well is showed as   flat here then i'm going to go into edit mode  we'll select all the edges once again right   click and clear the sharp now we need to create  the uvs i'm going to be creating some very dirty   uvs here so do not judge me on this i need to keep  things quick for this so i'm just selecting an   entire edge loop all the way around here so we're  going to go all the way around selecting these once you have a decent loop selected right  click and mark seam i'm also going to do   a little cross section down here on the bottom  just because i'd rather have some very clean uvs once again right click mark seam and now i'm just  going to select all of the faces here press u and   unwrap i'll quickly save with the control  s and let's take a look at the uvs we go to   the uv editor and we can see brilliant  some uvs have been made now we really   want these to be as big as possible so  i'm going to grab one of these press   l press g and move this up to a space  around here click here l g move this around   then i'm going to select everything  up with a press s and scale it up now that i'm pretty happy that that's as big as  i can get them i'll once again save and let's go   back into the layout from this point here we need  to start to create a material for this because the   way that baking works it goes from one material  to another so i'm going to open up a window here   i'm going to change this window here into our  shader editor make sure that our low poly is   selected here and inside of our normal sort of  shader editing here i'm going to create ourselves   an image texture i'll also create ourselves a  normal map and then i'll press shift d on this   image texture to make another one now i'm going to  connect up our color to our base color and i will   create a new texture now this texture needs to be  the size that you did inside of mesh room for me   i had this as 8k so i'm just going to times  this by eight and then i will rename this   as low poly texture with that done i'll hit ok and  that will turn our model black if you had material   preview on now let's do the same for the normal  here we're going to create a new texture here the   scale should be the same i want to change this to  low poly normal we do not need the alpha for this   we'll click ok and now make sure that you change  your color space to non-color we're going to   connect up our color and then we're going to  connect our normal over to our normal here now   at this point this is a pretty good place to do  another save ctrl s now let's get set to do some   baking i'm going to bring in another window up  here and i'll bring this to become an image editor   now with our image editor here and we can see our  shaders down here we're going to bring our high   res back our cage back and everything's going to  be sort of overlapping here now we need to set up   our render settings we're going to go over to our  render properties we're going to change this to   cycles we're going to go with a gpu compute if you  can and our render is only going to be about 8.   we don't need that much and we want things to be  very quick for baking then we're going to carry on   going down our light paths we're gonna change this  down to two we're gonna go down to where it says   reflective refractive and turn those off then as  we go down we don't really need anything else in   all of these but right here where it says bake  we're gonna go inside of here we're going to   start with the normals why not so the bake type is  i'm going to go with a normal bake and i'm going   from selected to active so with that on i need to  go down in here and i'm going to be using the cage   one now i find that cage usually gives me the best  results you can always change this extrusion to   point one and try it without a cage but the fine  for best results the cage usually works the best   i'm going to click on here i'm going to select our  cage and now with our cage selected all we have to   do is make sure that we click on our normal first  make sure nothing is selected up here but we're   going to click on our normal then we're going to  click on our high res and then hold down control   and click on our low poly and it has to be in  that order make sure you do that in that order   if not it will not work from here we're going to  hit bake and it takes around 45 seconds to two   minutes and lo and behold we get our normal map  i will zoom out here and you see that has come   out say magnifique but this is not saved so make  sure you go to file up here on the image save as   and save it wherever it is that you want to use it  i'll leave it to my desktop right now hit save as   and you know what it's basically the exact  same workflow for the texture except where   it says bake type we're going to change this to  diffuse and we'll turn off direct and indirect   contribution because we don't really care now  everything is already selected but it's not in   the right order we need to make sure we select our  low poly texture first then this is already in the   right case but what i like to do is unselect it  just in case so select this then we're going from   high res hold down control to low poly and we'll  hit bake once again and wait that short while   and lo and behold we have our lovely texture once  again let's save this make sure that it's saved   and now let's quickly save our file as well just  as a little extra tip many people swear that if   you also change your tile size here to the actual  size of your entire graphic it makes things go   faster but i don't find that it's that much of a  speed difference now let's take a look at exactly   what we've created here so i'm going to bring  my windows nice and close together once again   i'm going to hide my cage hide my high res and  here we have our low poly now we're not going   to see much so let's set this up so we have some  material now this is still looking pretty low poly   to me so what on earth do i have to do remember  that we can subdivide this as well if you want   but in reality this is pretty much a set so  let's just put this into the center now let's   play around with it a bit let's go right click  origin geometry to origin let's rotate this so   that we can see it nicely now let's also bring  in some light so we can really make this pop and lo and behold here is our lovely end  result and all of this is coming from a   super low poly model it's incredible  this workflow i love it so much   let's quickly render this and see the end result now let's talk about a couple of extra hints and  tips about photogrammetry the first one how to get   scale accurate photogrammetries it's awesome to  be able to have scale accurate photogrammetries   so then you can use them in product design and all  the rest but the nature of the beast is you don't   really get this especially not with photogrammetry  unless you're using lidar or something like that   you just don't get it so how do you go about  fixing this use a reference dimension this file is   down in the description if you want to download  and print it or get somebody else to print it   and between those two points it's 10 centimeters  so i just make sure that whenever i'm taking all   the photos of something that i can't measure or be  it in situ or let's say it's in a big giant rock   and i couldn't get the right size well i just make  sure that this is in the scene so then i can take   this all into blender and use those two points  to scale up the entire model to the correct size   now the next tip is about transparent and  reflective materials they're a real pain to do   photogrammetries of because the reflections really  throw off the equations now the only real way of   doing this non-destructively is to basically  mar the surface in some way be it with chalk   be it with flour be it with scanning spray or even  masking tape this is the only real way you have to   try and stop it being reflective now there is one  advanced way which is called cross polarization   but it's very advanced really difficult workflow  but it does give you some pretty crazy results now this next step is an interesting little  time saver let's say you don't have enough   time or power on your computer to do the depth  map and the depth map filter because these take   the most amount of time well you  can do this come down to where it   says depth map select it right click it  and go duplicate node and then from here   that's where you want to click from here this will  duplicate all the nodes and all the connections   from that point now we're going to delete  the depth map and delete the depth map filter   as you see we have a meshing here that's looking  for sfm data and lo and behold the point cloud   creates exactly that so we're just going  to drag and drop that connection to there   now lastly over here in texturing we need an  images folder now we're going to grab this from   our prepare dent scene right where it says image  folder we're going to drag that over into here with all that now connected right click and  click compute i've already done this so i'll   show you the end result i'll double click it  hide my structure from motion and look at this   it almost looks identical but it's only 80 000  triangles it's incredible and it's done in a   fraction of the time this whole thing only took  about seven minutes to compute now this next tip   might really help you when you're working with  gigantic scenes our end result here is 672 000   i've gone into the millions when i've been  doing larger photogrammetries and sometimes   that won't even open up in blender so we  need to do a decimate before we do that now   here's the trick we can add a decimate node into  here so let's right click add in search by mesh   decimate here it is mesh decimate and now we need  to break this connection just select the line   right click it and go remove now you  can reconnect this mesh into the input and connect that mesh output into the mesh now  with that connected our texturing has basically   disappeared so we have to recalculate it i'm going  to set the simplification factor of the d's fault   of 0.5 and i'll recompute this now and show you  the result and lo and behold if we double click   we now get a textured mesh with half the amount  of triangles it really can be a lifesaver to be   able to decimate within a mesh room itself now one  of my favorite ways of working with photogrammetry   data is sculpting within blender now i don't have  a video out on this just yet but it will be coming   in the future it might actually already be out  so check the description and i'll have a link to   it there or maybe if you're interested to find  out more about it hit that subscribe button i'm   sure you'll get notified and personally for me my  absolute favorite way of using photogrammetry is   within virtual reality as you can see right here  i've got this little snug space that i'm designing   and currently building and i get to check it all  out in virtual reality before i even build it now   if you want to see the full workflow of how i do  this i will have future videos coming out in maker   tales and if they're already out they'll be linked  down in the description and for the last tip let's   talk about when the bugs and errors happen  and this is going to happen quite a bit within   mushroom it's just the nature of the beast it's  a very complicated topic now all of these links   are going to be down in the description you have  the meshroom manual you have the meshroom google   group you also have the meshroom github issue  page and you also have maker tails discord channel   that has an entire channel just to photogrammetry  and i'm sure we'll all be there trying to help   each other out the first thing i would say is  clear your cache that is pretty much eighty   percent of the problems it's right there just tell  it to recompute and i'll do it just fine if that's   not it try and clear your local cache inside of  your app data files if that doesn't do it well   better dive into the github and see if there's any  solutions in there or even better come over to the   discord and we'll all try to pitch in and there  you have it i really hope that gives you a running   start into the world of photogrammetry now there  is always more to learn the number one place i'll   tell you to go check out is mesh rooms and node  system as i've only just scratched the surface   there also if you're interested in any of the  files that i have here be it the actual 3d print   files or the render files or any of them it's all  linked down in the description a huge thank you   to my patrons you guys are absolutely awesome and  it means the absolute world to have your support   and if you're enjoying what i'm doing here you  think i'm worthy of your support i would love   to see you there too don't forget that we have a  discord and that's linked down in the description   that has a photogrammetry channel thank you for  watching keep making and let the quest continue

Channel: Maker Tales

Views: 51,095

Keywords: photo, scan, photoscan, meshroom, tutorial, blender, photogrammetry, free, easy, quick, learn, fun, 3d, slicer, 3d scanning, scanning, mesh, learning, education, light, room, tips, technique, basics, 3d printing, 3d scan, how to, photogramatry, art, game, video game, assets, Instant Meshes, resin printing, phone, camera, photogrammetry tutorial, open source, asset, quad geometry, baking, normal map, texturing, make printable, point cloud, photogrametry, download, beginner, dslr, model from photo, model from photos

Id: TiSGfKm5cFQ

Length: 44min 58sec (2698 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 05 2021