
Meshroom: Open Source 3D Reconstruction Software (2018) [video] - hereiskkb
https://alicevision.github.io/#meshroom
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hbosch
Meshroom has been very fun to work with for what I can only refer to as
"closed-shell" or fully convex shapes. I tried my damnedest to collect a good
photogrammetry-based model of a flower, and the mesh fidelity I got from my
100 or so photos was pretty terrible... And I think probably because of the
leafs and the bowl shape of the petals on top. If I had time, I probably would
have separated the flower into distinct pieces (leafs, stem, top of flower)
and do more assemblage in my 3D program with discretely generated meshes...

However, stones and plant bulbs came out great.

Edit: After some of the other links in this discussion, I definitely need to
revisit this project! Some people have had great success with foliage and
flowers it seems like.

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sdwisely
I tried a wicker basket as a test mesh this week and had a great deal of
trouble with the handles.

For closed objects though the results are probably better than I've found in
commercial software.

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jefft255
Really cool, especially now that Autodesk's photogrammetry software is no
longer available for free. I think this is a good example of academic/public
research resulting in useful free software!

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anjneymidha
+1! There's such a wealth of computer vision approaches of practical value
locked up in CVPR and other research papers that could be exposed this way to
enthusiasts and semi-pro users

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jeffchuber
+1 to this comment

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pierrec
They link to the full Mikros showreel [1], implying that it's been used in a
bunch of blockbusters already. But I couldn't find any information on how it's
been used and in which projects, it would be cool to have more details on
that. It's always interesting to see the film industry working with open
source software, especially in cases like this where production companies are
sponsoring development.

[1]:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBy1g7gbXCQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBy1g7gbXCQ)

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pfranz
> it's hard to tell how it's been used and in which projects

That's always the case in vfx. The best source is contemporaneous interviews
directly with the people involved, which is sporadic and very rare. Most demo
reels, even for big software packages, are incredibly misleading. Company A
might have some partnership with a production studio, slap their name in the
credits, use their work in the demo reel, but the output is junk so the artist
scraps it and does it the "old fashioned way" from scratch. Or the software
gets used in a very specific, tangential way like roughing something out or
converting file formats back and forth.

VFX companies and software packages are trying to sell themselves for future
work. So they tend to gloss over details and present themselves much better
than they are in practice. After a show wraps, it's really difficult to get
good information. The files on disk may not even open anymore and the artists
have moved on.

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carreau
My organization recently considered buying more licenses for
photoscan/metashape ([https://www.agisoft.com/](https://www.agisoft.com/)) but
it was too expensive. I'm curious as to how it compares (I'm not a user myself
so can't judge), and I couldn't find wether this can run on a distributed GPU
cluster. If that's the case I would love to push for replacing photoscan by
this.

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sherr
A useful addition to that page would be a short summary of what
"photogrammetry" is and a description of what this software does. It need only
be a couple of sentences. Otherwise, looks very interesting.

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ungzd
Underlying photogrammetry library,
[https://alicevision.github.io/](https://alicevision.github.io/), has more
informative landing page.

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h2odragon
Still CUDA only? Didn't see an answer to that in a few minutes of clicking
around their site.

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microcolonel
Seems like some of it is still CUDA-only, from the AliceVision INSTALL.md [0].

I have to wonder how AMD is letting NVIDIA win so big in academia, when their
GPUs are actually quite competitive. I'm beginning to think that they have
some management practice or culture which makes it difficult for them to
retain software talent, otherwise I can't really understand how they always
seem to have a glaring weakness somewhere that they're not addressing.

[0]:
[https://github.com/alicevision/AliceVision/blob/develop/INST...](https://github.com/alicevision/AliceVision/blob/develop/INSTALL.md)

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errantspark
I don't think it's AMD's fault really, CUDA just as an insane amount of
inertia in the space and there's a whole lot of incentive for anyone to do
anything about it.

As much as I hate it I've been vendor locked to NV for years and as a result I
don't really care anymore. I'll never buy a AMD card because I need to get
work done and get paid. It sucks, but not enough for me to go through the pain
of trying to work with the far far inferior OpenCL based software for
rendering/photogrammetry etc. I don't even touch ML, but I assume the story is
the same there.

What's the value proposition for writing software that works with OpenCL when
your entire market already has NV cards? The price differential is tiny too,
maybe if AMD came down like 30% for the equivalent computational power.

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corysama
btw:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/photogrammetry/](https://www.reddit.com/r/photogrammetry/)

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sitdownyoungman
so...are shiny black objects better scanned into 3d objects now?

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nobbis
Another great free alternative is COLMAP
([https://demuc.de/colmap](https://demuc.de/colmap)).

And for those interested in doing this on mobile in real-time, we've just
released a beta SDK ([https://abound.dev](https://abound.dev)) that lets you
add real-time photogrammetry to any iOS app.

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gloflo
Considering this is a thread about open source software I feel like your self
promotion of a proprietary service is out of place.

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Sophistifunk
It's a thread about photogrammetry.

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gloflo
> Meshroom: Open-Source Photogrammetry Software

