Combing top and bottom

Hello All - 

I am coming from Agisoft and struggling to use RC. My usual Agisoft workflow is to take photos of top & bottom of model separately, then tell the software which specific points on the model should align to align the point/dense cloud manually. Is there a way to do this in RC?

I’ve followed 2 tutorials in RC with no luck. The method I have found online is to align both top and bottom separately and build a preview/normal mesh which to cut out the floor plane and export masks, then align both automatically 

When I attempt this I only get the top aligned and the bottom seems to spread out into multiple tiny chunks. I’m not sure what to do from here. Any ideas what could be going wrong? 

Hi asheridanweb,

were you able to align bottom part as one component when you were creating masks? You need to use upper and bottom part in separate projects, not in the one as you did, when you want to create masks.

In this case you can use control points to merge these separate parts. You need to use minimally three CPs placed over both part on minimally three images. More about control points: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S00_mLfbx6o&t=570s

 

Hi Ondrej - thank you so much for your response. 

To answer your question: I was able to align bottom part as one component when creating masks. Both top and bottom masks were created in separate projects. Both top and bottom align perfectly as one component separately in individual projects. 

I will begin testing out adding control points to get these to merge. 

Do you have any idea why this wouldn’t align perfectly? I’m trying to troubleshoot what could have caused the issue but it’s odd since both align perfectly separately. I took about 80-90 images each side, i’m shooting with diffuse light (3 umbrella lights, 1 softbox, product sitting on 4x4’ canvas on sawhorses), and as far as I can tell the images are pretty clear (shooting Sony a6000 @ 1/50, F8, ISO640/800). 

My first assumption is that I don’t have enough straight-side shots. With my previous use in Agisoft it seemed as if any background environment showed up into the shot it would throw off any alignment because the software wouldn’t know how to align the background, so I usually just get as close of an angle to the straight-side-shot as possible without capturing any background influence. It looks as if RC might do a better job at filtering these out? The two tutorials I’ve watched so far the images they use don’t appear to be cropped at all when running the first alignment. 

to add to above - here is my coverage for both top and bottom:

 

So, if you will create masks also from bottom parts and you will add the images into new project it is not possible to merge?

Maybe you should also capture the images from lower poin of view:

And then you can use the mentioned CPs and do a new alignment.