I have a folder of about 300 images all captured from a Samsung galaxy S7. I’m only getting green dots on about 4 of the images at most no matter how many times I have run the align images. It is a fairly small room so there is a very good amount of overlap in the images so it should be getting more.
I can’t understand why this is not working its a fairly small room is it because it’s the free software is there a magic setting somewhere that isn’t ticked for doing rooms or something?
Hello dear user,
Could you please share with us some screenshots of the interface to let us see images components and the 3D viewport. Also, please post here a few images you’ve captured so we can see what exactly are you shooting.
I have tried the image overlap setting on low medium and high and every time I click align images I get a different result.
I went in a circle around the room shooting inwards. I then also did a loop of the table in the center of the room.
The settings are okay, but the room has white walls and the carpet is almost featureless. RealityCapture needs to see detail/structure/pattern in your images to align them together. A white wall doesn’t provide RC with any points to detect as well as the carpet. Although, you should be able to create at least something out of it and the wooden stuff and the chairs should be reconstructed aswell. Please try adding more images and move around the room while shooting to get different perspectives of the subjects.
Are you sure you do not have a larger component? can you share the component list? (left pane in “1D”)
Yeah here is it.
Ok, so you seem to have a 156 pictures component aligned here. You even have 2 models reconstructed in this component. This does not look so bad, much better than the 4 at most that you say you are having, unless I misunderstood something?
Yeah thats the most ive managed to get alligned but it literally just came from hitting allign imageses like 5 or 6 times it gives me different results each time. Still not enough to make a decent mesh from.
Alignment can be somewhat of an art, and highly depends on your source photos if you want a VERY precise alignment.
There are guides on how to improve it on here somewhere if you search.
364607370640 Alignment improves after each try it is not a random occasion the accuracy increases after realigning and as Mike Simone said you will need to improve your shooting if you want to get a perfect alignment, it is just a practise, nothing to be scared of.
I’ve taken into account trying to get multiple feature points in the photography. I’ve given it 500 new images this time and I can usually only get 2 match points Agisoft gives me a very decent model. Where as this give me 2 matches. I must be doing something very wrong to be getting such awful results, but I have redownloaded the software multiple times.
I can’t understand this as I’ve seen people get amazing results with this application. Anything I do comes out like trash.
blob:https://imgur.com/d7b96ca7-c8ab-42d9-8c63-3a12414fcb6b
Like do I have to select all the images before I align there must be something obvious im missing. I just load in the photos and hit align.
Erik Kubiňan CR That doesnt seem to be the case for me. One of my runs it managed to get about 200 of the photos and add tie points. Then I hit align photos again and i was back to only 5 photos with tie points.
Is there anyway to tell it which photots to start from when alligning images or does it chose images by random?
They make it sound easy - just improve your photoing technique! I found after months of trying everything with building interiors, really no luck. Even with quite knobbly cracked old plaster RC couldn’t find anything to consistently catch onto. Not only ‘featureless’ areas, but linear objects too, where one bit of the linear was hard to distinguish from the next.
To me, this spoiled the building-interiors use of RC that I was hoping for, so gave up. Tho other folks like Götz Echtenacher seem to make a professional success of it, it defeated me.
The only way I could get building interiors photos to align reliably was to pin screwed-up balls of colourful patterned wrapping paper to the surfaces at say 50cm spacing. Then RC could see and distinguish several in each photo and could align to them - and the plain surfaces between were also happy. But that was much too slow and laborious for professional use, as a fast alternative to traditional measured survey of building interiors.
It’s worth mentioning that Alignment is only for the purpose of aligning the photos - unique to RC AFAIK, the resultant sparse point cloud is not used at all for subsequent stages - once the photos are aligned RC starts all over again to construct the mesh (and later texture it) by other means.
Tom Foster Yeah i’ve actually printed out some a4 pages with different shapes that i’m going to stick on the walls and floor. It’s just very weird that sometimes the image alignment works so well then other times I only am getting like 4 or so. I basically just have to sit and hit the align image button until I get a decent result.
Trouble is, that screws up the images for the texturing stage.
It’s not just hitting the Align button repeatedly - there are other things to try e.g. we’re told to delete all Components but the best one before re-trying Align. And there are non-default recommended settings for Align. And more - lots of advice, going back years, to search for about problematic Alignment, on here.
If you or anyone can come up with a straightforward workflow for building interiors, I would be agog to hear about it - please!!!
Dear users,
Speaking of clean interiors the main successful method is using either laser scans or a combination of photogrammetry and laser scans. As some of you cannot afford a laser scan you can always try using just photogrammetry but you need to understand that shooting a clean surface mostly featureless won’t always end up well, so this is not an issue of the alignment process itself as a subject should be picked well first. Anyways as you guys have noted yes you can use some patterned papers, stickers,etc. to make for some features and get a successful alignment. When using this technique you can as well shoot the interior clean and then shoot it again without moving any objects with the “stickers”. Then once you’re happy with the result you can use the clean images to texture it. Image layers function can be put to a good use here for example, or you can do it manually, that’s up to you.
The absolute best way is to just use a program like Maya to clean up the model and turn millions of polygons to a few hundred.
That’s the absolute best and prefered way imo.
But there is a ton of post work
, that is extremely helpful, for a RC representative (?) to say clearly that laser scan is the straightforward way with ‘clean’ interiors. In years, I haven’t seen anyone say that clearly on this forum. So now we know!
It’s also disappointing, as photogrammetry held the promise of ultra-fast capture with simple portable equipment (camera), as well as the ability to capture every hidden corner, which laser scanning from few station-positions can’t.
It’s also puzzling, as a succesful industry captures interiors for e.g. estate agents at high speed and low cost, by the SLAM version of photogrammetry, Paracosm being the latest arrival.
I still think sometimes I should offer to work as slave-assistant-apprentice for e.g. Götz Echtenacher, to learn his secrets with interiors!
Mike, post-processing as you describle is absolutely prohibitive, from my perspective.
The new building industry ‘BIM Alliance’ led by Bricsys CAD within Hexagon Corp which also owns Leica, plus collaborating architecture and engineering cos, aims to make ‘Scan to BIM’ a practical reality, whereby exterior and interior scans combine to leave a void volume between, which is the structure of the building - and AI (which Bricsys pioneers) then creates as CAD solids and designates as walls, floors, ceiling, roofs etc - all automatically. So far, only Leica’s speciality, laser scanning, is envisaged as scan source, while other CAD/BIM cos see photogrammetry as equally important i.e. mixed sources combined, as suggests
Just noticed that everything is getting split up into components. Each component has about 3 or 4 cameras in it. I doubt merging them together would do anything as they are orientated and posiitiond all differently from each other.
How you work with components is on of the most import things in RC. You should read the doc to perfectly understand this.
Then the method is to align, delete the small components (<20 pictures), tweak the settings, possibly add control points and align again… until you have a good large components.
