Which photogrammetry tool is the best ? (3DF Zephyr, Metashape, Reality Capture, Meshroom)

hi there how's it going new video today about photogrammetry today I'm going to use the Mini 3 Pro from DJI to do a 3D scan of this building right there it's an old barn it seems to be unused right now so it's probably not going to bother anyone if I fly around and uh I'm going to show you quickly the process and then we're going to mostly compare the results of different softwares using the same set of images so uh let's go [Music] thank you [Music] so here we are starting the photogrammetry process by going into the settings and then starting with an orbit relatively far away just to get a general overview of the building then I'm doing two passes with the an oblique angle 45 degrees more or less now doing the inside of the roof this is a particularity of the DJI Mini 3 Pro you can aim the camera super high up very convenient for these kaises then I'm doing the back wall with oblique angles 45 degrees every time then the other side of the roof 45 degrees but the other way around and 90 degrees to that then I'm starting to do the outside but more precisely doing the walls here I had to do it again because the exposure was all wrong and then I get a little closer to capture a bit more detail and on that face I'm going even closer doing some Wiggly lines up and down and up and down and then do not forget the overhangs take a picture aiming up so that you can get these overhangs now at that point it was running out of batteries so I had to swap it and I just resumed my capturing process from where I left off here this shot is kind of hard because the sun was hitting the sensor directly so quality is not the best here I wanted to capture a bit more of the inside of the barn the ground as well here in oblique shop with the pillars and here I thought that this little detail with the two planks was kind of looking nice so I just got closer in order to capture it [Music] foreign [Music] so this is the result given by 3DF Zephyr first thing that we notice is that there are holes in the roof it's especially visible in the shadow of the roof you could see some light goes through so this part has a few artifacts uh first thing that we notice is that the colors are completely off now this is due to the way it was shot it kind of looks the same on every single software so this is not really a software's fault the sun was hitting the sensor of the Drone directly and it just caused massive flares so this is why it looks so bad but overall the shape of the roof has been reconstructed relatively well given the conditions of the shoots the back wall of the barn is both amazing and disappointing so the texture is really sharp and full of details except in the Middle where it didn't align some of the cameras that were closer to the wall and it really shows that the quality is much lower at that particular spot foreign overall looks pretty good in my opinion especially because of the textures the textures are very sharp and the overhang is well reconstructed it's overall pretty good I get a nice texture on the beams here very well reconstructed now this is one of the best parts of the mesh because I took so many photos close up to the wall so the texture is good the geometry is good I think this is the best reconstructed place of the entire building with 3DF Zephyr now the pillar is a bit wobbly and the texture is quite bad this is because it didn't take any close-ups of that particular part so on all softwares it looks kind of bad but this one actually sorts it out because at least the pillar is monolithic now let's take a closer look to the more challenging part of that building which was the inside of the roof here you could see that all the beams have been relatively well constructed and the texture is relatively seamless in terms of color the colors kind of shift from one side to the next it starts a bit greenish and it ends up more orange and the real color was more yeah orangey Brown so there is a bit of a gradient here but globally it looks pretty detailed and very nice now onto the planks the little detail here it did reconstruct it relatively well at least it understood that the two planks were separate objects which is not always a given on the roof besides the missing tiles and the little holes it's okay I would say I didn't take any close-up shots here once again it was more of a wide shots and also a part of the cameras did not align properly so we only have about half the information about the roof as we actually capture it with the Drone and as a result the mesh doesn't look as accurate and the texture is not as precise now for the rest of the interior of the barn we could see the left wall is a bit wobbly this is probably because I took fewer pictures over there but the rest of the back wall inside is relatively why we're constructed once again good geometry and good texture so the conclusion for 3D F7 here in my opinion for that particular scene is that it did relatively well although it failed to align some of the cameras which in turn lower the quality of most notably the roof and also the back walls texture on the outside but overall the texture looks relatively sharp with a lot of detail and this again is with the default settings I didn't touch anything else it just clicks next next next next with all the default settings so this is the type of mesh and result that you can get out of 3D of zephyr with the default settings onto metal shade so right off the bat the first difference that we noticed is that the roof doesn't have any holes so that's a good sign compared to 3dsf here we also noticed that overall the mesh is a bit more round and with less noise on it this is because the filtering by default in metal shape is a bit more aggressive than in three fsphere now of course this part is not super well reconstructed because it was in the shadows and the sun was hitting the sensor so in all softwares it didn't really look good now the back wall here looks very nice the texture is relatively detailed and quite sharp although slightly less than on 3dfs here here this facade reconstructed the overhang relatively well you can see that the beams are correctly represented and they don't have any noise on them or any weird shapes sticking out this is the most detailed part of the mesh and here you could see that it's it's very round and filtered and the texture here is not as good as on 3DF Zephyr even though all the photos were taken very close to the wall here of course the sign is barely readable this is actually the better one you can almost make out what it says and the roof the inside of the roof is relatively well reconstructed all the beams are present there's no holes anywhere in the roof both inside and outside and all the beams look pretty good I'd say it did very well on this one however the little detail with the planks at the rear of the barn is not as well reconstructed you can see that there's a little blob joining the two planks so that's not great here's a close-up of the roof not much to say except that there are no holes so that's a good thing again and the shape of the tires is relatively well reconstructed and the inside of the barn looks pretty good it's pretty uniform overall both in terms of geometry and texture so I think metal shape did really really well I think that overall is the mesh that looks the best from all angles sure it's not perfect but overall I do prefer the way it looks I would love to see a bit more detail in the textures but this of course is the default setting and it can be tweaked and textured with a higher resolution can be generated by the software without any problems now for the third commercial program that we're testing in this video reality capture now one quick note it generated over 70 million faces and when it has more than 40 million faces it actually refuses to display the full mesh so I had to down sample it within reality capture to display a 20 million faces mesh so this is what you're seeing here so this part just like the two previous softwares has a completely different color than the rest of the mesh again because of the way the pictures were taken not because of the software it did its best and the leftmost part is a bit messy but the rest of it is better just like in the previous two examples here the back wall looks pretty good all the pictures that were on this side have been aligned correctly so there's no Gap as we could see on 3dsf ears so that's a good point for reality capture this face of the building I think looks very nice because it's very even the quality is homogeneous and uniform everywhere and the overhangs are pretty well reconstructed overall it's pretty good I'd say it's on the same level as meta shape maybe a little better in terms of texturing so this part of the building once again is the most detailed one because this is where I took the most photos from the closest position I don't think it looks as good as what 3DF Zephyr produced but it definitely looks sharper and more detailed than what meta-shape produced however you can see that the filler is completely messed up there is a huge piece that is sticking out of the pillar that didn't exist in real life the here for the underside of the roof I think it's pretty well reconstructed overall just like the other two softwares it's pretty detailed and it did a relatively good job at making a gradient of the collar so you could see it starts from kind of grayish and then it moves towards warmer colors but in a relatively smooth way so that's at least coherent and looks better on the finished products now the two planks that are standing here against the wall I think that reality capture did the best job reconstructing this part better than any other software tested here it looks relatively sharp the geometry is good the separation between the two planks is good separation between the planks and the back wall is good it did a very good job here now the roof I think has more 3D detail than what metal shape did or 3DS Zephyr did so once again reality capture here managed to do better but also keep in mind that they generated over 70 million triangles compared to the 20 million triangles of metashape and the 3 million triangles of 3DS that year and to finish this little tour of this model the back wall from the inside of the barn pretty well reconstructed very uniform texture so I really like that I'm pretty happy with that part so in conclusion for reality capture something that needs to be noted is that it generated a huge amount of vertices and faces over 70 million faces but it also did not manage to align all the cameras in fact it only aligned 588 out of the 637 cameras compared to metashape which managed to align all the cameras the texture is pretty good I believe it's the single 8K texture and I think it did very well aligning that and populating this with the most relevant bits from the photos that were used as an input and the last Contender of our list last but not least mushroom the only purely completely free and open source software of the bunch now of course first thing you notice the quality isn't the same now one important note here it's not necessarily the software's fault it's just that mushroom globally is much slower than the other three softwares that I just presented and what happened is that it crashed during the night and so I had to relaunch it but because I didn't have that much time I had to down sample the depth maps by a factor 4 instead of the regular 2 that comes default with the software so that's why the quality of the mesh is much lower as you can already tell now a little peculiarity of mushroom on this case is that it didn't produce a lot of triangles it actually produced 2.4 million triangles so that's less than what 3dfsphere did but in terms of textures it generated a whopping 27 4K textures super Overkill and that step alone took about three hours which is more than the three other softwares combined to generate everything from camera alignment mesh generation to mesh texturing insanely slow but the textures look the best obviously now you have to give credit where it's due even though we used a much lower resolution for the depth map meaning that the resolution of the mesh the final mesh is going to be much lower as well it actually did a pretty good job at reconstructing the object and here of course we see everything back to back so it's really apparent what the differences are but if you're just using this you're going to be very happy with the results especially if you actually take the time to produce the full resolution mesh taking 12 hours maybe 20 hours to produce a very high quality mesh now in my opinion where the mesh suffered the most for mushroom is the inside of the roof the underside of the roof is missing beam elements and it's relatively mushy overall so this is really where the quality drops significantly and it can also be seen here with the planks where it did not understand that there were two different objects separated by a gap of air and it kind of merged everything into a mushy mess so in conclusion for mushroom I would say that while the results are quite a bit lower grade in terms of geometry compared to the other three softwares I think it really deserves credit and really deserves to be on this list because it is on the same level you can actually get very good results with it it just takes much much longer to process everything but keep in mind that this is being done by people who are not getting money from it it's open source anybody can contribute and it has been free and will remain free forever for you to use with no restrictions whatsoever and I think this really deserves credit so if you want to get into photogrammetry you're not sure you're gonna like it just go with the mushroom it's free it doesn't engage you to anything it's relatively lightweight and it can produce phenomenal results now let us quickly just do a recap of the pros and cons of each software and what we can learn from this little comparison overall all four softwares did a really good job at recreating what I captured with the DJI Mini 3 Pro and the user experience was relatively similar between all softwares now here are a couple differences that I think are noteworthy so in terms of speed the three commercial softwares were kind of toe-to-toe basically 3DS that fear took about 1 hour 17 minutes to generate everything from the photos to the final textured mesh metashape took around 58 minutes to get its result and reality capture took as well about an hour and 10 minutes so they're very very similar in terms of speed then you have mushroom which is in another league but not in the right way it took more than 3 hours and 30 minutes with a quarter scale on the depth map to generate the mesh and it took 1 hour 30 minutes to texture the mesh and that is not even taken into account the alignment process that worked very well it did align almost all cameras 616 out of 637 cameras but it took more than an hour to do this so mushroom really really slow compared to the other three softwares now speaking of alignment quality the best software in this regard is meta shape it aligns all cameras no problems then comes 3DF Zephyr with 628 out of the 637 cameras aligned and third place you get mesh room with 616 cameras and the least good was reality capture surprisingly with 588 cameras now what happened here is that it created three different batches the first and Main bash was 588 cameras so this is the one that I've used to reconstruct the mesh and the one that you've seen in the video but it also used 21 cameras that were shooting the roof so one of the two passes that I did over the roof and considered this to be a separate object for some reason and I didn't want to go through the process of merging point class and whatnot I just wanted to have like the defaults click on the button and wait the results approach and experience so that's why I use just the main batch with a 580 cameras now a third batch was actually created by reality capture but it was all messed up it was basically some of the pictures of the back wall on the outside of the barn and it was all curved and absolutely not usable so even if you tried to merge this it would have created a worse result than not merging it now another point that is worth mentioning is the quality of the mesh I already mentioned this a little earlier but here is a summary of everything so the most triangles have been generated by reality capture with over 70 million triangles and it just refused to show it because over 40 million it just refuses to show it to you and it just displays the point Cloud so I had to down sample it to 20 million triangles so that it would match the density that meta shape generated with about 19.6 million triangles then comes 3DF Zephyr with a much much lower triangle count with about 3 million triangles and then you have mushroom that only generated 2.4 million triangles again measuring would have been able to generate at least twice as many with the proper depth map resolution then when it comes to the texture 3DF Zephyr did a very good job it used four 8K textures and the results I think are very good it looks very sharp very detailed so I really like that meta shave by default generated two 8K textures they look pretty good but I think they're a little blurry in places you can tell that you have less resolution to work with compared to 3DF Zephyr then reality capture generated a single 8K texture and I think it did a very very good job the result is very good for a single 8K texture and then you have mushroom and it's only as always it generated of what being 27 4K textures providing the best texture yet but on a mesh that is subpar now we can quickly talk about the ease of use I found all softwares to be relatively easy to use when you don't know anything it's relatively well guided and you can find a lot of resources on the internet to help you get started as long as you don't want to tweak the settings all of them are equally easy to use I would say but then reality capture tends to be a bit more confusing when it comes to changing the parameters it's all tiny and it's all like little boxes in this list not necessarily super easy to use and for mesh room a similar saying you click on the Node and then you have many parameters you don't necessarily know what they mean so you have to look up another documentation or have somebody explain that to you for three of zephyr and metashape there are some presets that you can use that are much easier to understand for beginners but it also allows you to go deeper into the process and actually tweak stuff yourself so overall they're pretty good but I would say that 3DF Zephyr and metashape did a little better in terms of usability now the last point that we're going to compare between all these softwares is the pricing options of course it's going to be something very important when you're going to decide which software you're going to use so let's start with 3DF Zephyr it has a limited free version that caps the number of images that you can use as an input to 50 which is pretty decent for small objects it would clearly be insufficient to model such a big object as the barn that I just did here or any other kind of building or large area that you would want to map with a drone for example but it's free forever to use and you can export whatever you want in whatever quality that you want then you have a light version that is priced in Europe at least at 199 euros and it basically offers you everything that you're going to want to have and it's a permanent license you buy it once and you use it forever and you do have one year of free updates so I think that's pretty good and then you have the full version which either is 4 200 Euros if you pay it once or you could also access it for a month for 250 euros and the full version is going to have things like Ortho photo generation and geo-referencing of images and 3D models it's also going to have photo consistency optimization which tremendously improves the quality of the meshes that get generated and it's clearly aimed at professionals that are going to be using it every day then we come to metashape it has a very similar pricing option you don't have a free version that is going to be usable forever however they do offer 30-day free trial of the Standard Version which is otherwise sold at 179 dollars so that's very similar to what 3dsf ears sells for and then of course you have the pro version which again has ortho photo generation and georeferencing and all these things that you're going to want to use when you're a professional and that version is sold for three thousand five hundred dollars for reality capture we have a pricing model that is quite different so of course you have the pro version full version we're at about 3750 it's the same ballpark as the other two really but you also have a paper input mode now what that means is that when you import photos You're Gonna Pay Per megapixel of these photos so if you have imported 10 photos at 10 megapixels each you're gonna pay for 100 megapixels but once you have registered these photos you can export as many things you want as long as it's based on these same photos so for example you will be able to export different meshes with different levels of quality different textures different algorithms used and you will not have to pay more than what you already paid when you first registered these photos so that's a very good point and if you're going to be using this very seldomly once every two months or something like this it's probably going to be the cheaper option to get a very good result very fast but at a relatively cheap cost so for example here the 588 12 megapixel images that were used to create the mesh of the barn it would cost about four and a half dollars to register all these now of course keep in mind that I can just re-export anytime as many times as I want without paying a single more dime and then finally of course we have mesh room it's free it's open source download it now use it forever simplest model there is [Music] so that's it for this video I hope you learned something useful I hope that it was exhaustive let me know in the comments below what you think about each software and what experience you have with them [Music] subscribe and also I'll see you in the next video [Music] don't try to fight me [Music] [Music] me [Music] [Music] try to fight me you better run [Music] [Music] the [Music] stay inside [Music] are you wash your smiling [Music] my life [Music] [Music]

Channel: Jérôme Tabeaud

Views: 94,179

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Id: udXQHys50aA

Length: 27min 16sec (1636 seconds)

Published: Sun May 07 2023