First stab at Photogrammetry

For those that don't know photogrammetry is the process of taking multiple pictures of an object and using specialized software to automatically create a 3D model from those pictures. This is my first test with a free piece of software I found online called Meshroom.

_Meshroom

The software finds the relative positions of all the camera snapshots that you take and builds a mesh from it. It also creates textures as well. I was interested in this software because I saw online that it was pretty much plug and play. I've known about photogrammetry for years, but the process was always laborious and super time consuming. With Meshroom, I can report it is still pretty time consuming, but it's not laborious. You just drop all your images in and press start, there's a ton of settings to tweak, but I just left everything at default to see what I'd get.

It's still a bit rough, but I imagine the default settings are set up for speed or moderate resources. It takes maybe a little over an hour to process with the amount of images I took, which was about 20, which is low. To get a really good result its recommended to take 50 to several hundred. I feel like even at this level of detail though this would be useful as a background asset. Not so great for a closeup, but could be useful for something that's not supposed to be closely inspected.

The pictures I took weren't the best quality either as I did this indoors with nothing but artificial light. I want to try again with sunlight and see what that gets me. After everything I threw it in Cinema 4D and just dropped a couple lights in to get a few renders. This is pretty fun and I'm looking forward to seeing what Meshroom can do. The software is open source so as far as I can see there isn't any documentation and most of the settings don't have names that make sense to a noob like myself, so it'll probably be a bunch of trial and error.

Anyway let me know what you all think! I started to give my thoughts on the current FUD, but I think I'll save that for it's own post. TBH this is about the lowest I've ever been on my feelings about what's going on here, but yea like I said, I'll talk about that in a separate post. Thanks for looking peeps!