PIX4D Vs. Agisoft Metashape-3D Modeling

you're watching gm6 drone mapping in this video we're going to take a look at a 3d model that was processed in both pix4d and agisoft metashape now if you want to learn more about drone mapping then head over to gm6 dot io our online drone mapping course is the fastest way to get you up in the air and mapping now before we get started today a few things to keep in mind normally when you create a 3d model you don't put the images into the software and just use the default settings and go all the way through and not have to do some sort of work on the project in between the steps sometimes it's cleaning the point cloud sometimes it's cleaning the mesh refining the mesh in this situation that's exactly what i did i left each program at their default settings so that we could take a look at everything making it as even as possible so without wasting any more time let's get started [Music] all right so i'm going to start out in pix4d we'll look at this 3d model first so this is not a new feature but i want to point this out because it's worth noting that the fact that you can draw a boundary around your project before you start makes a huge difference when it comes to some 3d models and the reason for this is because if you've processed large 3d models then you know the points from the point cloud can get spread out over a huge amount of area which would technically be you know a couple miles maybe if you wanted to look at it in scale all right so first thing i'm going to do is we'll go into the ray cloud all right so this is the 3d model the sparse point cloud and as you can see that bounding box or that line cleaned or cut this off clean so that you didn't have points spread out all over the place and so here's the dense point cloud and it looks pretty good i'm not sure exactly what this is normally i would say that it picked up points from the sky but none of my images had the sky in it so it most likely is just noise from the thin metal pieces here i'll turn on the mesh next so now this is the part that really differentiates i think uh agisoft and pix4d is that the mesh when when it's been generated you uh you can't cut it clip it trim it any of that you just you're stuck with mesh now you can go back and trim the point cloud and then regenerate mesh but what you have is what you have so um that's kind of what you would be stuck with unless you go in there and really clean up let me turn this off so here's what it looks like with uh without any of the points you can tell that it is a tower but you can't give it to your client in this in this form because well it just looks bad so you can see that any of the mesh that came out thick and kind of bulging out it's not just pieces of point cloud that are in here that you can clean out in this case it's actually integrated into the metal so the only thing that i know of to do in this case would be to make the points in the point cloud smaller so that when it generated the mesh it wouldn't be as bulky but it's it's still going to be too big because in this case the mesh was still not even close to being formed around the point cloud all right so now let's look at the size of the final output file look at the 3d mesh if you notice there's an fbx file and an obj file these are both your 3d models so by default pix4d will generate a second 3d model file now you can turn that off but by default it's automatically going to be generated and that takes up a little more time as well i'm sure but for this comparison i just want to look at the obj file so this is 70 megabytes for the obj and the texture which you have to have is 18 you've got roughly 90 megabytes for a 3d model it's really not bad it's very easy to work with you can give that to a client that's not going to overwhelm their system so no big deal however you can't give them this i don't think so next let's look at agisoft in this case we have the 3d model this has got the mesh on it because when it produces the mesh it shows in that form so here's the sparse point cloud and as you can see it's not real pretty it's not clean looking however when the mesh is generated and the texture is added then it looks a lot better now by default it's not perfect it's got some breaks in the metal up here but this is completely usable and i think if you were in a hurry and you had to deliver the final product to a client without having the ability to go through it thoroughly and make sure that everything's perfect and they were okay with this then you know you would have a good product to deliver just simply by running it at default and that's assuming that you take all of your images in a correct way that allows for your model to be put together like this one of the things that i like about agisoft is that it's created this 3d model but it doesn't create any types of output files until i need it so in this case i can i can come over here and i can click on my 3d model i can say export model it'll generate that file and then i can export it and i have as you can see about a dozen different file types to choose from so i went ahead and exported my obj file all right so this is 52 megabytes and to see the texture file i'll have to open up so here we go all right so the texture file is six megabytes so total we have a 58 megabyte file compared to the uh 90 megabytes so it's a little smaller and in my opinion better looking but you you can decide on your own what you think all right so now i want to take a look at the times and again to get your report out of agisoft you have to export it and it'll generate the report so it doesn't generate it on its own which is no big deal because it just takes a couple seconds to generate of course i've already got mine here so i'll take the times from this one and i'll take the times from pix4d's report and then we'll add these up there's your comparison of the 3d models i hope you found that helpful be sure to like share and subscribe if you're not already and don't forget to check us out at gm6 dot io

Channel: GM6 Drone Mapping

Views: 9,794

Keywords: drones, drone, drone map, 3D Mesh, Agisoft, UAS, GM6 Solutions, drone images, US Map, Photogrammetry, Pix4DMapper, Drone Photo

Id: 1_ugDgGaQ9I

Length: 8min 56sec (536 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 13 2021