Model House Photogrammetry

After the success of the fox I tried to scan a slightly more complex small painted plaster model of a cottage. I was reasonably confident that it would work but I was interested to see if the photogrammetry process would pick up all the small details.

I used the same turntable / light tent setup as I did for the fox. I took pictures at 4 different heights with 36 images at each height.

The actual processing was not very exciting really. The default settings for my photogrammetry scripts worked fine but there were a couple of isolated artifacts that were removed by tweaking one of the MVE settings. The images and the configuration files can be found at my GitHub repository – https://github.com/john-davies/Photogrammetry-examples.

The initial dense reconstruction included part of the stand as shown below but a small amount of editing with Meshlab removed this quite easily.

Overall it went without incident really and I think that most of the details have been captured. The final full 3D model can be seen on the test site – http://thereteng.appspot.com/photogrammetry.html

Updated 2/5/19:

This is the final, edited version, uploaded to Sketchfab:

A couple of final points that cropped up during this process:

1. I was going to 3D print this model but I didn’t bother eventually because the 3D printer is single colour only. Having previewed what it would look like in monochrome in Meshlab it was pretty non-descript and I didn’t fancy getting the paintbrush out 🙂
2. I use Meshlab extensively for the photogrammetry work but around this time a system update broke the Linux Snap install. This was particularly annoying because I thought that Snap was meant to fix this sort of thing. There was a lengthy discussion on the Meshlab GitHub issues list ( Problems with Snap install on Ubuntu 16.04 #215 ) but none of the suggestions there would make it work. I eventually despaired and, using instructions from a related issue ( Meshlab from snap won’t load on Ubuntu 16.04 #271 ), I built the software from source. It was remarkably simple and now Meshlab works fine again.