Reconstruction in Normal Detail taking too much time

Development Asset Creation
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1

Hi,

I’ve been happily making  scans with around 300 - 400 photos without any issues. RC is fast and the whole process usually takes around 6 or 7 hours.

Now I’m making a bigger scan with 1600 photos and I’m running into this problem:

  • Alignment is relatively fast and all goes well

  • Reconstruction in Normal Detail (default settings) starts well and seems to be going fast.

  • After 5 hours the progress bar is around 50% and the finish estimation says it will finish in around 5 hours, which makes sense because the progress is on 50%.

  • After that the progress starts slowing down and the finish estimation starts to move further away. +7hours…+12 hours… seems to be pointing to the infinite…

  • After running for 30 hours the progress had been minimal. The progress bar was just a bit over 50%. So I terminated RC.

 

What could be the cause? Why does the progress slow down with time?

The PC becomes very irresponsive and it’s almost impossible even to move the mouse cursor.

I’ve seen a user here in the forums with a somewhat similar problem and there was no solution in sight.

My PC specs: i72600k 16Gb Ram - GTX 1060 3Gb (normal HDD drive)

1600 RAW photos from 2 cameras - some are 18Mp and some 12Mp

 

Any help would be appreciated

Thank you

 

2

There is a multitude of reasons for this behavior.

Did you set a reconstruction area to limit how much work RC has to do?

Is the cache filling up your disk?

Is RC using up all your RAM and has to resort to using the swap file? It would explain the unresponsiveness.

16Gb RAM may be a little on the low side for 1600+ image projects.

3

Hi ShadowTail,

 

Yes the reconstruction area is set. I still have 650Gb free on the HDD where cache is located.

Just checked and RC is taking 5Gb of RAM (no other applicaions running).

Right now it’s not irresponsive. I’m trying a second time, already 6 hours in and it’s getting slower and slower.

Should I try reducing the Maximal vertices count per part? Does it make sense?

 

 

4

Hi Filipe,

The estimation is never accurate, it can be twice the time or several times as long. Depends on the image set and the quality of alignemnt and more.

The quickest way to narrow it down is to create a new file, align again and do another reconstruction.

5

Hi Götz,

That’s really annoying, not having an idea when it will be finished. I’m having this problem with large scenes. I simply have no idea if it’s going to take 10 hours or two weeks…

Could you explain how creating a new file and aligning again could help on this?

6

Hi Filipe,

I feel with you, it is awful not to know.

In my experience (no data, mere gut-feeling), it can take up to 3 times (or so) as long as initially displayed. There is no general rule because it depends on the dataset. Usually, I would say it’s about twice as long.

I am quite confident to say that 10 times the original estimate is too much. Similar things have been reported and also remedied by starting from scratch. It could be that in certain constellations RC kind of gets stuck due to some mathematical peculiarities in the model, which are not supposed to be like that. Sorry for being so vague, but I am a user and not a software engineer. Another possibility is that the file got corrupt. In any case, I myself have used this “method” a few times and it worked for others, too.

 

7

Thanks Götz. Other users experiences are very valuable, even if the solutions are “gut feeling”. It’s better than nothing that’s for sure.

I will try that on future scenes. As for the big scene I was trying to process I had to give up, unfortunately.

 

8

No problem!  :slight_smile:

You mean you canceled? That was probably the only option anyway. Now you can start fresh, if you still want…