#VISUALSFM MESHLAB SOFTWARE#
#VISUALSFM MESHLAB FREE#

#VISUALSFM MESHLAB SOFTWARE#

WeвЂ™ve done some quick room scans with the Kinect using Skanect software and while the scans came out pretty good, they were really heavy and were crashing my computer. For this weвЂ™re also looking into Agisoft, VisualSFM and Grasshopper.

In the spirit of Akihiko Taniguchi we expect the resulting spaces to be filled with holes and other imperfections (if we get it to work at all).

#VISUALSFM MESHLAB FREE#

While most agree that Agisoft produces better resulting point clouds than VisualSFM (used by Jesse in the above post), we became very interested in VisualSFM for a couple reasons discussed by Jesse: free and open source as well as the fact that each of the steps are exposed and it allows you to participate in the process.ДЄ second Idea weвЂ™re exploring is constructing 3D spaces from videos. I found a blog post the other day that is extremely relevant to our research: Most agree that Agisoft is the top photogrammetry software program out right now and is used my most major 3D scanning companies like Direct Dimensions. We met with Sophie to have her run through their process and show us the basics of Agisoft. SophiaвЂ™s blog explains it in more detail. We have been hearing about the project Aerialscape done last year by MICA students Sophie Stoerkel and Clara Hickman in which they rigged an iPhone up to a small balloon device to take continuous aerial photos of landscapes to create accurate 3d models using the software Agisoft which specializes in photogrammetry.

We recently found the Photosynth project, which overlaps a lot of our interests. This would open up the possibility of creating a participatory or communal 3D scan of an environment in which people could contribute their photo from a specific location to help construct the space, thinking about the function of GPS in apps like Instagram or Google Earth. WeвЂ™re interested in the possible inclusion of GPS coordinates from the photos we take. Right now weвЂ™re interested in using photogrammetry to create our virtual space, which is the process of using photos to generate 3d models. It might be good to limit the number of programs in our workflow as much as possible since constantly importing and exporting files from one program to another can become really tedious.Д¬atie and I have begun more specific research into constructing or reconstructing environments using computer vision. I think there are ways of doing these things in just visualsfm and mesh lab too, but IвЂ™ve read that some people find CloudCompare to work better. WeвЂ™re thinking of trying out an additional open source program CloudCompare which is a point cloud editing program which would allow us to merge point clouds meshes and reduce the size of a point cloud if we wanted to generate a more simple/lighter weight mesh in mesh lab. As we get further into compiling our meshes into a single Blender scene weвЂ™ll see if weвЂ™re going to have to tweak our meshes/textures so the file doesnвЂ™t become huge and slow. WeвЂ™re still working through a couple problems with texturing some of our meshes. We decided free software is worth the few extra steps. Major advantages of Agisoft are that it combines the work done in Visualsfm and Meshlab into a few simple bottoms in the same program as well as having a nice user-friendly interface.

The problem may have been that we used an older, slower computer to run Agisoft on. We tried out Agisoft, the proprietary alternative to visualsfm which is generally agreed to work better, and it worked pretty well for one of our smaller image sets, but crashed on a larger set of images where VisualSFM did not. All three programs are open source and for the most part have been producing pretty good results. Moving from VisualSFM to Meshlab and finally to Blender seems to be the best workflow for our project.

Visualsfm meshlab