Reality Capture -> Blender -> Sketchfab

I am trying to export to an OBJ file from Reality Capture and import it into Blender, combine it with other objects and export to Sketchfab.

No matter what I do, I lose the colouring on the mesh from Reality Capture in the final result.  Is anyone aware of a “cookbook” recipe for going from Reality Capture -> (import .OBJ) Blender -> (import .blend) Sketchfab without losing color? 

Many thanks for your help!

Edward

It works pretty well with textured models, but I am not sure with vertex colors.

Did you unwrapped and textured your model in RC ?

Hello Johnathan,

Thanks for commenting on my request.  In RC I textured and coloured before I exported. Reading the material that RC supplies, I got the impression that Texturising and Colourising are an “either / or” proposition, but the model in Blender looks much better when I did both.

I have not unwrapped and don’t quite understand what it does.

Best Regards,

Edward

When you texture in RC :

-an unwrap is automatically performed if needed (this is mandatory to have a unwrap if you want to texture).

-the vertex colors are updated from the texturing.

So only “texture” should be enough in your case.

Then, in Blender, are you sure this is not only a display issue ? I am not a specialist of Blender but when I import an .obj in Blender I always have to change the material display to “texture”, otherwise I have a greyish untextured model.

if you export from Blender in .obj and then import in MeshLab, do you have colors ?

 

When I first import to Blender the object is white.  I hit Alt-Z and this provides texture and color consistent with RC, but not at the same quality.  I will experiment with Meshlab to see if the colorisation is maintained.

Thanks for your suggestions.

Edward

Interesting.  When I export as OBJ from Blender and open the OBJ in Meshlab, I get the error “Failure loading textures:”. So, it looks like my export from Blender is flawed somehow.

Still battling with this.  If I export the OBJ file and import into anything but Blender, the texture is not maintained.  If I re-import to Blender, everything is fine. Fishing through the Internet I am not finding anything useful.  I’m going nuts with this…

Does it work in MeshLab ? If so I would say that the .obj file is fine and this is only a matter of display / material / shading / lighting in your software package.

 

Unfortunately, when I import into Meshlab it also loses the texture. I expect that I am doing something wrong with the export, but if that is the case, then I would expect when I import back into Blender it would also lose the texture - which is not the case. As this looks more like a Blender issue than an RC issue, I have asked for advice on the Blender board as well. 

If there are suggestions on other 3D editing applications I should be investigating beyond Blender, I welcome them all.

Maybe something wrong at export, because this should just work out of the box with MeshLab. Can you post a screenshot of the RC window when you click on the model (showing the model unwrapping state…) and another of the export window ? (right after you “save” the .obj) ?

Fixed - my mistake was that when I was exporting, I didn’t copy the textures (although I thought I had). When I imported back into Blender the png file was still in the old place and it worked.  When I used Meshlab it was looking for the png file in the same directory as the obj and mtl files and bombed.  It wasn’t until I used Meshlab on my mac that I saw the reference to D:/… and realised what the problem was.

Thank you for staying with me, Johnathan!

Best Regards,

Edward