Photogrammetry

Meshroom Experiment

We created these two, very simple animations using about two dozen photos that we took on an ideal day for 3D scanning (meaning: usual UK weather with overcast light conditions) using an iPhone. We wanted to test what’s the best quality we can produce with Metashape, only using a handful of photos.

All animated elements are done in Blender: my trusted procedural camera shake rig combined with some animated crop region to create this appearing/disappearing effect. We used Blender EEVEE for rendering out the sequences, with the final render times below 5 seconds per frame.

A little overview of my camera rig. I "developed" this about 10 years ago and have been using it eversince. With this setup you have separate empties controlling location, orientation, roll axis and focal distance. This tutorial by Zach Reinhardt (CGBoost) is showing a similar setup with autofocus.

We are really happy with these results, the generated mesh/textures are surprisingly good and the whole process from importing the images to exporting the animation was really smooth and streamlined.

This last sequence is Eevee's render look. 100% real-time with HDRI lighting, bloom and ambient occlusion.