Clean & Smooth Photogrammetry Edges (RealityCapture + Mesh Mixer)

[@AzadBalabanian]

Update: Since RealityCapture v1.2, they've added a few features that improved this workflow and may remove the need to export to Meshmixer to have clean border edges. They added: - Cut by Box: where you can define a region to cut the mesh with a box and the result will have clean, straight edged borders. When simplifying - Simplify: when simpifying, they now have a setting for Border Decimation where you can pick "keep border intact" Great!

[@EkhyOk]

man... you are my GOD!! thank you so much... you save my life

[@antoniovachev6063]

Incredibly useful for a beginner like myself. Very much appreciated

[@KevanCarlton]

I really like your stuff, I am working on getting up to speed on photogrammetry and all of the stuff you have put out is super helpful! you got a new sub i'm excited to see what else you do!

[@Scaramouche122]

Dude this genius. Thank you.

[@argentinavr]

great! i will put in practice this today, thanks for sharing knowledge!

[@AzadBalabanian]

Blender has horrrrible performance when mesh editing for any sort of high-poly meshes compared to Mesh Mixer. Plane cuts work more reliably (Blender's default bisect is imprecise), hole filing actually creates evenly distributed triangles (instead of horrible faces), among other things. Same tasks takes me half as much time in Mesh Mixer than doing it in Blender (although I do wish I could do everything in Blender instead of jumping between programs)

[@go1672]

Super helpful! Thank you for taking the time to give this tutorial and workflow. Would you recommend cleaning in Meshmixer over Blender 2.9?

[@AzadBalabanian]

Yup! Although I do use Blender quite often for various operations, editing meshes in it is just really slow. This might be changing with Blender 3.0

[@officialshowerloop607]

Really well done!

[@AustinBeaulier]

Awesome very useful

[@Bluescobra]

What you can do to decimate and retain some quality in RC, is to always split the count by 2. So if for instance you have 8 million triangles, and your goal is 2 million, then you first do it once with target 4 millions and a second one from 4M to 2M. I've changed a model from 32M to 100K like that, without much quality loss.

[@AzadBalabanian]

Does that actually make a big difference between decimating from 32M to 100k?

[@Bluescobra]

@@AzadBalabanian If you do it in one step it will look very bad, but if you take steps as mentioned, the visual difference is very small. I suppose decimation is something very good to do if you plan to do further work down the line, maybe some work in Maya to flatten and use as a floor tile in a 3D engine. It is also something you can do when you want to upload the asset to some online site which limits the amount of triangles. If you want to work on more complex scenes withing RC, with multiple components added after you already rendered, that may be a good way to reduce the rendering times. Last thing I can think of is the limit of 40 000 000 visible triangles in RC. You may want to fully view the asset withing RC and so you have to decimate under that amount, else you are forced to view a "limited" cloud of point, or forced to use a clipping box to only view a specific part. Hope that helps! Many thanks for the video by the way. I am always happy to see people's workflows and tips :)

[@shaneneyome]

What is this stuff about licensing? If I take my photos and create the model don't I already own it?

[@AzadBalabanian]

They changed the pricing of the software for a flat subscription price (which was quite expensive) to making the software itself free to use. You only need to pay if you’re happy with the project which I find to be a great model because you don’t need to pay for scans that fail, which is a common thing that happens when you’re experimenting/learning.

[@jurandfantom]

Nothing interesting if you use Zbrush, but still thanks for video

[@AzadBalabanian]

Most people need a free alternative thats super easy to learn. Zbrush isn’t that