Redrobes blog about playing with the technical side of graphics.

Time marches on and developers have been busy. There are some new photogrammetry apps out there and one looks particularly good.

Released (recently) in Aug 2018 a project my the name of Meshroom has frozen a build for release for both Windows and Linux.

If you head over to AliceVision website there are some links there to download the software as prebuilt binaries:

https://alicevision.github.io/#meshroom

Before you do however you should know that the program requires CUDA compatible graphics cards such as an nVidia one. It uses the graphics card to significantly speed up the processing.

The user interface is very slick and very easy to use. All you need to do is drag some photos of the terrain / object to a panel, save the project with a useful directory and name and then hit the start button. It will run all the numerous processes in sequence showing you progress bar until it finishes up with a model in .PLY format.

You can load that into Blender or MeshLab to view / edit it.

I have tried it out on some simple objects that this time but will look into generating a tutorial with photos of real terrain in due course !


Another suite of applications that is much more difficult to use but does not have the CUDA restriction is to use MVE - or the Multi View Environment.

https://www.gcc.tu-darmstadt.de/home/proj/mve/

The results from both of these two suits of programs are much better than previous models generated with Insight as per previous blog entries.