Free Photo Scanning Workflow! (VisualSFM and Meshlab)

[@Chrismitchellstudios-com]

For those asking "Surface Reconstruction Poisson" is now under Filters > Remeshing, Simplification and Reconstruction > Screened Poisson Surface Reconstruction Octree Depth is now Reconstruction Depth Also "Quadratic Edge Collapse Decimation" is now called "Simplification: Quadratic Edge Collapse Decimation" in the same menu

[@GlebAlexandrov]

Chris, thanks for an explanation.

[@GabrielCopony]

Kevin! is that you?

[@JohnBrady1844]

Thank you!!

[@BeingOfLight-gq4fm]

What kind of pc requirements do you need? When i tried it, this program used 90-100% my cpu.

[@colindrost4886]

thank you my friend

[@maxerdergrosse_3579]

"Fun isnt something one considers, when recreating the real world in a 3D programm. But this... this does bring a smile on my face"

[@Seemsayin]

Thanos. Thought that sounded familiar. Very cool.

[@cameronteeple5296]

I have been waiting for an effective FREE way to do photo scanning FOREVER. Never fail to disappoint, Gleb.

[@eviltwin2322]

Great video Gleb, thanks. One quick tip that will slightly speed up reconstruction is that VisualSFM has to be told to use CUDA for its calculations, it doesn't do it by default. In one of the menus (I don't have it nearby to check the exact names, sorry) there is the option "use CUDA" and a few parameters to play with. It should make a difference for you.

[@GlebAlexandrov]

You're right, thanks for mentioning this. I enabled CUDA, but I forgot to actually compare it to non-CUDA calculation time. It may speed things up.

[@LD-kq3om]

Evil Twin I

[@lbgstzockt8493]

its under tools>enable GPU>match using cuda (as of 14.4.2018), also the little gear symbol in the menu row doesn#t seem to do anything

[@lwiltshire]

A-freaking-mazing. Just an overflow of casual ninja-level skill throughout.

[@GlebAlexandrov]

working on a new one, in Meshroom this time!)

[@lwiltshire]

@@GlebAlexandrov Subbed! Can't wait.

[@3DJapan]

Very cool. I did basically the same tutorial a couple years ago but I like your addition of decimation. I didn't know MeshLab has that function at the time that I did mine.

[@AyathTheLoafer]

Another metod of getting a picture sequence to work with, is this: Shoot a video (or find a suitable video clip elsewhere) where you circle the motive. Load the video into Photoshop. Export the video render BUT as a picture sequence. save all the pictures in a folder. In Explorer you size explorer so that you have thumbnails in sequence but with e.g. 10 columns of pictures in the viewpane. Box select the left column from top to bottom and copy those pictures to a different folder. You now have every 10 frame saved. That will decrease the number of files to work with. You can repeat as necessary.

[@wailfulcrab]

You can do that, but keep in mind that movie is recorded in much less resolution that taking shots. More resolution of sequence - better results.

[@wingnut0837]

Thumbs up for the funniest narration in a while. Love it. Learned alot.

[@Eli-ns5uw]

2:57 This is why i love you gleb

[@i_make_beats]

for me I got it working but then the dense points didn't do anything at all :/

[@tennicktenstyl]

This video deserves more views. Btw if you can't get the newer version of meshlab to create your mesh properly just download the earlier one.

[@tmkdigital6361]

This is just amazing Gleb; will share it!

[@GlebAlexandrov]

Thnx!

[@user-qx7tm5df8j]

i would if i had one to share with KappaRoss

[@zarrar7133]

Gleb Alexandrov thanks but can I use photoscan software

[@richNfit4life]

Hey there, Gleb. At around 4:00, you copy and paste some files. You're using a PC for this. The files look totally different on my mac. What do I copy, if anything, and where do I paste them using a mac and not a PC? Thx.

[@tybrady64]

Wow, so cool that you're doing all of this with freeware. I do similar work, but the software costs thousands. If I was younger with no extra money, I'd be watching this video multiple times and getting all the software listed. Too cool!!!

[@jdpgandalf]

Please Help! All works fine with the example fotos. But everytime I take pictures on my own in VSFM I end up with only 3 Cams (of originally 92 ...). What am I doing wrong or is there some special trick while taking the pics? (Only tried tiny stuff like a PS Controler e.g. and ofcourse I did it 360° from various angles so they all should be able to get matched ...)

[@jdpgandalf]

in VSFM all good after Matching doubles but something wrong after Reconstruction step. It allways matches like 3 or 4 fotos together before it starts over again from blanc ... :'(

[@SardiPax]

Great tutorial Gleb. I played around with this a few months ago but I hadn't thought of animation. Entertaining as always.

[@GlebAlexandrov]

Sardi Pax yea the possibilities are endless. think about realtime stuff like games!

[@gigabit6226]

Wait sardi i'm subbed to you xD hi!

[@marcdraco2189]

This is a great way to make very cool models of real-world objects like rocks and other natural stuff, Gleb! That is for a great introduction. Must. Sleep. Now.

[@ir0nm8n]

you really should do an updated version, too bad on the new ones basically nothing works :/

[@darylkillinger3088]

Thanks Gleb, Really Exceptional Video. Your delivery is concise, informative and you speak better English than most native KZbinrs. Thanks for taking it into Blender. I'm looking forward to your other videos.

[@eduardof.schoenau499]

Amazing, just one question, i found this video searching for Civil Engineering Solutions, how we scale the geometry to the real size / scale 1:1?

[@justinroberts1599]

I downloaded the latest version for Windows 64-bit (says "MeshLab 2016.12" in the title bar). The "Surface Reconstruction Poisson" at 8:47 is not an available pick from that list. Also unavailable is the "Quadric Edge Collapse Decimation" at 10:31. Help!!!

[@MrIlvis]

I wrote short alghoritm for the latest Meshlab version, because some places has different names Meshlab version version:2020.07. Based on video: ------------ File-> Open project...-> \.nmv -> Select Vertices -> select unneeded vertices and delete them File-> Import Mesh -> \.ply (also delete unnessecary vertices from .ply mesh) ------------- 1. To generate poligonal surface: Filters -> "Remeshing,Simplification and Reconstruction" -> -> "Surface Reconstruction: Screened Poisson" ------------- 2. Simplify Geometry: Filters -> Remeshing,Simplification and Reconstruction -> Simplicification: Quadric Edge Collapse Decimation ------------- 3. Before adding texture: Filters -> Cleaning and Repairing -> repair non Manifold Edges by removing faces ------------- 4. Adding texture: Filters -> Texture -> Parametrization + texturing from registered rasters. ------------- 5. Export to ".obj" file: File -> Export Mesh As... -> Files of type: ".obj" (Alias Wavefront Object) Uncheck "Normal" Press "OK" ------------- Then edit with Blender. :)

[@sadangelsmp]

the file from VisualSFM is not open in Meshlab, do you have any idea why?

[@amethystgem1542]

Gleb in first try the visualsfm not show object 3D points completes then when i try again it is not show anything in dance 3D points

[@Attdia]

6:46 все пропало, не показывает мэш

[@euan3858]

Can anyone help me Poisson mesh reconstruction thing isnt showing up for me?

[@rangerRick9895]

Watched a couple short tutorials before Now I'm hooked with GLEB. Awesome work you do brother keep it up. Thanks a million

[@stuffedsomething1699]

This is truly the best kind of birthday present!

[@creativical]

Supposing that it is your birthday today, congratulations from me. ;D

[@GlebAlexandrov]

Cheers!

[@collectiflickthetoad]

Happy finally you decide to try out free/open source solution vs 123 catch. Great tutorial like always. You can do the Poisson surface reconstruction also with CloudCompare , for some complicated model you can get better result than MeshLab. Personally when i do Poisson surface reconstruction i set to 12 8 1 1 and when apply Quadric Edge collapse i check preserve Topology Just a small terms mistake, if you do a camera movement closer to the subject you DON'T zoom but you do a dolly mouvement (Dolly mouvement : motion towards or motion from.), when you zoom you change focal length and the consequence is you change also the perspective ( is already a sort of special effect), if you do a dolly mouvement , or in short a dolly, is more natural movement for human eyes.

[@AmanSingh-xg2ns]

After dense 3d point white screen is there please help me I can't get any further

[@afxcrush41]

I have a computer where the Sparce reconstruction only shows half of the images. But in another computer the sparce runs good. The first one has a GTX 650, the other is a nvidia 920A

[@rotorixfpv]

The second step(reconstruct sparse) doesn't place points in 3d. Camera points placed correctly. But no model just empty space like object shadow surrounded by color points in one plane

[@bdragon254]

You rock dude. Millenium Falcon all the way

[@terryd8692]

Epic Gleb. Been looking for a good way to do photogrammetry into Blender for ages!

[@RemingtonCreative]

Dang Gleb, you beat me to it! I was planning on making a tutorial with a similar method next week. Anyway, great tutorial! Definitely better than I could do.

[@user-dx4rx3bt2l]

It would be nice if you still made one though

[@GlebAlexandrov]

Remington Graphics Timing, timing is everything.

[@lucidstorm123]

I opened project in meshlab and it's empty, model gone , that got me confused initially, it seam that when its reconstructing its also saving which is untypical vis a vis photoscan

[@ugurgulluce]

thank you but i have a problem. when i delete points in meshlab, view is broken and i did not see point cloud. what is the problem?

[@vinnipuhreal]

Please help. How to make face 3d from photos in blender and export it with textures?

[@arturperzyna1997]

You can batch resize using irfanview as well.

[@raymondstpaul4913]

Why do you have to export it to Blender an not another software such as Hitfilm?

[@ankitpassi]

Hey Gleb , any particular things to keep in mind while taking photographs , optimal resolution of photos , what type of lights to use , is flash can be used (i guess not , it will ruin natural lights) , any other things ? Thanks for tutorial , will share!

[@impaga]

Can i rotate object in 1 step instead of horsing around?

[@phantomapprentice6749]

Looks like just the thing for Abrams Wars EP 8. Question, would this work just as well for a none-banged up product?

[@nordic_rabbit2805]

You sir, have solved ALL OF MY STRESS OVER MY BLENDER PROJECT.

[@yanliu678]

How to remove the highlights and shadows of the map? Request ~

[@maybem5750]

The "surfacve reconstruction poisson" menu point is missing when I try to do this...

[@wassollichsagen3676]

me too...

[@dp-mason]

You have the best commentary I swear

[@rhysdawson7625]

what would the process be to scan and save the model as stl file for 3d printing?

[@oscardiliscia]

Hi, why when I want to see Dense3Dpoints, do not show them? I have windows 10. Thank you.

[@nfenton]

Great tutorial, but when I add my project into Meshlab, there's no .ply file for me to import afterwards (step described at 8:02). I also don't have the Surface Reconstruction: Poisson menu option. Any ideas?

[@FASTFIREFOX29]

i can't find it either >:(

[@ExtinctGaming06]

Is there a difference for the windows version that says for nvidia cuda and the one that doesnt

[@cristinamoriconi5272]

I'm starting by saying that this tutorial is a life saver! BTW i have now the MeshLab 2020.06 version and I need some explanation about some commands that are changed over time.

[@dennisferrara2996]

Hello Gleb, congratulations for the tutorial, really crazy. I have a problem. When the amount of interpolation in MeshLab, the matter at hand, upside down, and this does not allow me to create the mesh properly. Then beyond that I do not charge the intersection of the three axes, but moved to the right, how do I fix? thank you

[@angad158]

Hey I am getting a white screen after the termination of the dense reconstruction command. The log window says that the cmvs command failed. What do I do now ? Any kind of help would be really appreciated. Thanks!

[@carlesm7654]

The best tutorial of VisualSFM

[@BikerNic]

Freakishly awesome Gleb. I work in the 3D field with 3D scanners and printers. I found this tutorial quite usefull as I have a few large scanning jobs I need to do this month.

[@peer1976]

Just tried it with screengrabs from Apple Maps. It's working great for recreating city landscapes. Thanks for the tutorial!!

[@peterhindes56]

When i try to use visualSFM it makes multiple "models" and matches the images that should only be for one object into multiple other groups, how do I fix this?

[@hatzbeile]

Hi! Gleb Alexandrov I hope you can solve me this question, Is there any way to translate the texture genereted by photogrametry to a new retopo mesh in Blender? I've done a photo scanning model like in your video but I've done a retopo mesh of the same model too, and I want to move the texture of the high poly to my new low poly mesh. I ask for apologize about my english, It's not my native language.

[@ericohman]

Is this relevant today or what are the top softwares today? I recall seeing some software with dark grey GUI, not sure the name

[@MAGN-bc5bz]

when i reconstruct the sparse points it just becomes a bunch of random dots

[@kasetophono]

Any CMVS alternatives for Mac users? 🥺

[@joetke]

GREAT pedagogy! instructive, helpful and detailed. Thank you so much Gleb

[@MrFatPony]

Спасибо большое тебе за твои уроки Глеб :). Big thanks to you for your tutorials Gleb :)

[@GlebAlexandrov]

kageratiridia happy to do that) thnx

[@CGJam]

photogrammetry is so much fun, its even more amazing that you could do it directly on your mobile phone with software like scann3d. though i think this workflow will give better results in the final render!

[@StuartWilson4d]

so lets say hypothetically I went overkill and had like 5k fairly low res photos. it is taking over 24 hours to just analyze and match the images. Should I even continue to the next step or just reshoot? I was trying to map an area of a building

[@KazeTdr]

is this good for human face reconstruction too?

[@marcoflagg6601]

Thank you so much for your clear presentation and organization of materials! I really appreciate it.

[@Richard_GIS]

What settings do you use for matching, i have a i7 7700K and a Nvidia P1000 and got a longer runtime than you in 2016?? The other runtimes are 10 sec, and 151 sec.

[@petyavodolaz]

Не думаешь сделать апдейт на тутор, с использованием Мешрума?

[@grzegorzbrzeczyszczykiewic897]

4 some reason vsfm doesnt reconstruct one side of image,and after implementing file.nvm into meshlab it doesnt show anything

[@robestey5628]

Well that was just to friggin cool Alexandre. Well done. Thank you. I will play with this

[@nordic_rabbit2805]

Sparse Reconstruction not working. Nothing shows up but 5-7 points

[@t.t.kreischwurst7158]

Does CMVS-PMVS work with the CPU Version of VisualSFM? I installed it like it's shown everywhere, but when i reconstruct the dense, it says after a second, that it is done, but it has'nt done anything.

[@kbachani229]

hey, im having a problem with meshlab. when i click open project and click the file, it dosnt load, there are no particles on the screen, when i click the layers tab, it shows the name of the images but no dense point cloud. (the number of photos i used were only 57). pleae help, i have to submit mu project in a week. thanks in advance.

[@user-dx4rx3bt2l]

I have the same problem

[@user-dx4rx3bt2l]

Fixed it. In my case I just had to go to "view" and click "reset trackball", the model was off to the side for some reason. If it still doesn't work for you try toggling the options in the bar on top of the screen.

[@kbachani229]

Thanks dude, but I'm not using mesh lab anymore because I'm using agisoft photoscan. It's a bit slow but the process is very simple.

[@BeingOfLight-gq4fm]

For some reason mine did not show up in mesh lab

[@ahmedshakib3883]

More tuts like this one Gleb, This was very nicely done and it was in depth too.Cheers :).

[@Earth2Texas]

Very informative! This is the most helpful video I've seen so far on this topic. Thank you.

[@8-bitgamer894]

when I use the screen reconstruct poissen command my generated model looks jagged. I am assuming this is due to the parameters I used. can anyone suggest the parameters I should use with the newer version of sfm??? any help would be greatly appreciated

[@zandorius]

Thank you for this, did wonder how to go about photoscanning. If taking photos of objects with sky etc in the background would you mask out the unwanted sky in each photo before starting the conversion?

[@GlebAlexandrov]

Zandorius, no need to mask anything. The software does everything for you.

[@zandorius]

Good to know, have an awesome old park bench near my house, I shall attempt to scan it and include in a scene. Wish me luck :D

[@GlebAlexandrov]

Best of luck. Look, I did it. )

[@Hannes007]

hey this is a nice video and probably the first one who showed me how to correctly install the program. i still have problems with the result. the pictures from the third layer where you go as near to the ground as possible dont show up in the 3d modell. can u tell me why this happens to me everytime?

[@jmlietaer]

Great demo ! Will try this out next week.

[@vgabndbeatshop9683]

Any workarounds or alternatives for MacOS users? This looks so badass!

[@brianmghanga8048]

can you make an update to this video

[@Flash007b]

Great video! This helped me a lot, but I still have a problem. When I compute missing matches it says 0 pairs to compute match. I don't know why this happened.

[@jungyeonho]

refinePatchBFGS failed! How to fix this error? help...

[@aguatemalachavez]

So very impressive tutorial Gleb, you really rock!!

[@LutchoCressoni]

Great tutorial, I'm getting some nice results. Does the software use the accelerometer reading (is it stored on the picture file??) or its 'just' math? If so, we could keep the camera fixed and turn the object

[@curtisnewton895]

why dont you just add the binary path to the system path, you dont need to copy all files just use windows environment variables !

[@nordic_rabbit2805]

Hey, Gleb. What’s your PC build?

[@gameclip1940]

I am doing a 98 photo model. I have been waiting four almost 4 hours for the dense reconstruction to finish. Is this normal ????????

[@adarshsankar2189]

Hey, Where did you get that millennium falcon paper cut-outs?

[@EdNorty]

Adarsh Sankar Download Pepakura software. Then, search for Millenium Falcon pepakura and download that too.

[@curtisnewton895]

what camera would be required ? I tried with a webcam I get horrible results

[@ChillieGaming]

Tf?

[@aux_anges]

Useful and fun, as always. Your work is consistently amazing. Thank you.

[@PULSARBYTES]

my texture is not showing up it is just black..I really can't find the Problem :/

[@PULSARBYTES]

ok got it working now..

[@itsWVLID]

Hey how it's worked mine not working it's black texture

[@PULSARBYTES]

Resize your photos to 2400x1600 pixel.. that worked for me :)

[@itsWVLID]

Thanks it's work thanks

[@MichaelPeterDalsgaard]

Hmm. That did not solve the problem for me. Did you start all the way over with 2400x1600pixel pictures? Or did you change the texture size after making the meshlab export?

[@tomsart]

Note that VisualSFM is only free for non-commercial use! There's an MIT licensed photogrammetry program at regard3d.org, though so far I can't seem to make it wrap all the way around objects, it insists on reconstructing from only one side.

[@GlebAlexandrov]

Yep, nice remark.

[@liozlioz]

Hi, thanks for the tutorial when I try to open the nvm file on MeshLab i cant see any mesh, although it recognizes the files on the right toolbar. do you know what is the problem?

[@janiscivan8470]

Ran Levi had this aswell, but apparently the visibility is just not enabled by default. You simply look on the right side where the layers are and you click the icon that says points and you're good to go

[@aserta]

@@janiscivan8470 This is the most important part of the tutorial. And it's missing from the video.

[@leightonwestbury92]

How / where the hell did you learn all this stuff..... a brilliant video .....keep up the good work !!!

[@Mrshineside1]

Can you tell the title of the song he was twittering on entry

[@barutsuomiei]

What are the advantages of this workflow over the one with just Photoscan and Blender? Do the scans have better topology / less holes ? Is it faster? or is it just the fact of everything being free opposed to photoscan? Keep up the great work!

[@GlebAlexandrov]

Yes, the advantage here is the cost. Personally, I still think that Agisoft Photoscan produces almost unbeatable scans.

[@barutsuomiei]

Thanks for the reply! After watching your videos, I started to focus on photogrammetry and blender, and now, after 6 months, I work professionaly doing projects also using real-world objects. The future is here!!