Photo Scene Editor for Project Photofly – Wrap-Up (for now)

During the first attempt at testing the Photofly technology preview, I was met with a server glitch, but in the end, all went well

  I thought one of the biggest problems was with the interface itself. I’m not sure if this is present on all systems, but with dual wide screen monitors, the first of the images (Scenes?) began very far to the right of the interface as shown in the image to the right….

  And there were no scroll bars to slide things over. It wasn’t until I started writing this article that I found out that you need to drag the thumbnails using your cursor, and I would be willing to bet via touch screen as well. Cool, but unexpected.

Creating a Scene

To begin with, I took  a bunch of images of a globe (shown in the image above) at about 10° intervals while walking around the thing. I went around three times at different levels, and wound up with 54 images. I then fired up the Photo Scene Editor…

 …clicked the Add Source Photos button…

…then found and selected the photos, which pile into the editor like so…

…I then pushed the Compute Photo Scene button and waited a few minutes whilst the cloud thingie gathered and digested the data…

…and there it is…

  

The final result shown above is a Photo Scene File (.rzi) file which in turn can also be saved in DWG format as a point cloud as shown below…

 

 

With the point cloud in-hand, I was hoping to convert  it into something useable in Inventor with the new  labs project Autodesk Shape Extraction —-but, unfortunately,  that tool only works with indexed point cloud files (PCG or ISD) —not the DWG file shown above. Bummer.Hopefully at some point the two programs will become compatible, and by then maybe Inventor will be in the loop as well.  Opening the DWG in Inventor gives you a 3D point cloud that can only be viewed through an odd window as shown below.  It looks very pretty cool, but is useless. But, this is after all, a technology trial. 

But in the end, Project Photofly does, as I have said before, have a great deal of promise. I can immediately see the technology being used by the remodeling industry to capture the as-built state of existing structures for use in BIM remodels  —if the algorithm can be tuned up a bit. In the real world, the photo taking guidelines (and therefore the underlying algorithms) are unrealistic.

For instance,  I tried to capture a shed, but could only get one of four sides without trespassing. With trespassing, I could have gotten two. The narrowness of the approach to the front and back of the structure made it impossible to get anything close to the images required to create a decent scene. A walk around most neighborhoods will show this to be the rule, not the exception.

I’m sure the wrinkles will be ironed out in the end and all will work as expected. The next post will be on the Shape Extraction tool. I tried the hack described on It’s Alive in the Lab. Stop back to see what happened…

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