Drone Mapping Texture Settings

Community Community & Industry Discussion
1

Hello Users!

I am aiming to create a pointcloud and ortho image from data captrued from drones. Processing on Reality Capture.

I am looking for the best advised ‘Texturing’ settings for optimal results and to understand a bit more on what each setting means so I can alter these settings to the context and desired export for the final product (Maybe changing size of resolution/points etc).

Thank you for hearing me out, I hope everyone is well!

2

Hi 360George,
we recommend to use these settings:

The meaning of all settings you can find in the application Help.
RealityCapture Help

You can adjust the following settings:

  • Gutter represents a number of pixels of a chart border in a texture image. Gutter is important for avoiding visible artefacts on a model during rendering. Many rendering engines use techniques like mip-mapping, where the texture is downscaled several times to create an image pyramid. If the engine renders texture from higher pyramid levels, then a color from one chart can bleed to another chart in the interpolation process. This can happen just in case you do not have the gutter between the charts large enough. The default value 2 is enough to avoid this type of artifact in most rendering engines.

  • Maximal texture resolution You can choose from 512x512, 1024x1024, 2048x2048, 4096x4096, 8192x8192 and 16384x16384.

  • Large triangle removal threshold Let us assume that you select 10. Then, in case that a triangle’s edge is 10 times longer than the average edge length of all edges of the model, the system will unwrap it so that the triangle is mapped to just 1 texel.

  • Style defines a strategy which will be used to build a UV map.

  • Maximal textures’ count The texel detail is adjusted automatically so that the texturing fits into the selected maximal number of textures within the selected maximal resolution.
    RealityCapture Help

  • Coordinate system defines a reference coordinate system which defines a measurement unit. Change the project coordinate system to change this value ([read more](file:///C:/ProgramData/Capturing%20Reality/RealityCapture/LanguagePack/help/en-US/appbasics/coordinatesystem.htm)).

  • Unit type shows the selected coordinate system unit, e.g. meter, inch or “units” if the unit type is not known.

  • Texel size Here you can set dimensions of a texture image pixel. When using the custom option, set this value, for example to 0.01 to make a 1cm texel if the coordinate system unit is a meter. Once you have a model calculated, you can use the Unwrap tool to estimate the minimal reasonable resolution.
    RealityCapture Help

Use the following settings to set additional texturing and coloring settings.

  • Coloring method Linear results in average values. Multi-band (default) uses several channels, it divides images into more frequencies, which are joined together afterwards. Lower frequencies, which can be joined linearly even in bigger surroundings, carry color and brightness. Higher frequencies carry detail, for example texture grain size, and are joined in a different optimized way.
  • Coloring/Texturing style While the Visibility-based style is fast and sharp, the Photo-consistency based style is slower with more complex results.
  • Coloring/Texturing image layer Choose the image layer used for coloring/texturing. By default, the geometry layer is used.
  • Downscale images before texturing The number that you type here represents a multiple by which you automatically scale down images before texturing. Whereas using number 1 means no change in scale (100% resolution), using number 2 means that each side of an image will be 2 times smaller (25% of the original image resolution), etc.
  • Downscale images before coloring This number scales down an original image before coloring, similarly to the one mentioned above. The recommended and the default value is 2.
  • Fill in uncolored / untextured parts This feature is ideal for overlap checks, when there are some parts in a model not covered by a camera or laser scan. Set the parameter to True when you wish the application to intuitively fill in the areas of a model, which have not been covered by the input images.
  • Recolor model after texturing Enable this option to calculate vertex colors from textures - you will get coloring and texturing with a single click on Texture (F9).
  • Use legacy unwrap algorithm Unwrap models using the old algorithm.
  • Prefer 16-bit/HDR textures generation See [16-bit and HDR images](file:///C:/ProgramData/Capturing%20Reality/RealityCapture/LanguagePack/help/en-US/tools/importhdr.htm) for more details.
1 Like
3

Thank you for the such in-depth response my friend.

I will give this a try and let you know the results!

4

Default settings are the better choice. The image failed miserably with this setting.