I spent most of this morning playing around with the Photo Scene Editor for Project Photofly with nothing to show for my time –so-far.
Early this morning I downloaded and installed the Photo Scene Editor for Project Photofly from the Autodesk Labs website. The program is very small, and the download and install were quick and painless.
I had seen a video by Donnie Gladfelter over at thecadgeek yesterday, and decided to re-watch it as a primer before delving into the program myself…
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…with the video watched, and the program installed, I got to work. I went to the start menu to fire up the program, and saw that in addition to the program, there was a PDF titled “Getting Started with Photo Scene Editor” present —so I gave it a quick read.
After reading the manual, I went outside and photographed a series of pictures of a cluster of grapes from one of my vines……which turned out to be a bad idea on my part. The fluttering leaves and hundreds of nearly identical round grapes was a poor subject to start with. Even with the bad subject matter, the program seemed to have figured out two of the six images as can be seen in the image below…
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…but as hard as I tried I could not manually stitch the rest of the images into the scene. There needs to be four matching points which I could not achieve…..but, —if I were to do it over again, there would be no problem whatsoever (I think).
A couple of years ago I worked with a vendor who used what must have been an early version of this very same software. He digitized the as-built state of a pocket for a recessed handrail using a digital camera and numbered, self-stick dots. He took lots of pictures, and told me that the software combined most of the images automatically, and turned the whole thing into a point cloud. It sounded cool, but impossible. In the end, the vendor didn’t get the contract, so I never saw the results. Bummer.
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I did find a typo in the little message box that guides you through the stitching process…
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…which is common in works-in-progress such as this, they just need to be reported —so consider this one reported.
Getting back to it.
I moved onto a different prop hoping to make life easier for this test. This time I photographed a big geode, and took seven pictures instead of six thinking that it would help with alignment (I hadn’t remembered the vendor incident as of yet)…….and besides that, geodes of this size rarely blow around in the wind like grape leaves. That was my thinking.
This time when I clicked on ‘Compute Photo Scene’ the progress bar for ‘Creating Photo Scene (Online)’ froze at 5%. After a good hour at 5% I clicked the ‘Quit and Receive Photo Scene Later’……….causing a little dialog box to pop up where I named the scene and entered my email to be notified when it is done. That was nearly eight hours ago.
Having no end to the story, I decided to create another scene, this time using a more angular prop –a gingerbread house my daughter made in kindergarten. By this time, my memory of the vendor had kicked in and I used markers for alignment (coins). My hope was that the angularity of this subject would speed up the processing —– but no go. It’s been about seven and a half hours now with no results on that one either.
I’ll keep my fingers crossed. I am very interested in this project, and hope it works out well. We could have used something like this as a service back when I worked at a yacht company. We had zillions of as-built measurements that needed to be taken, yet we could never justify a high-end laser scanner. A per-use service for point clouds such as this would have been easy to get OK’d.
I’ll post an update when the results come in. Until then…
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