Please, can anyone help me with COLMAP or advise me on a simular app, for photo scanning/modeling for 3D prnting.
by photoscanning/3d modelling, are you referring to photogrammetry?
Ah, I see it is a photogrammetry program. I’ve just installed it and am about to investigate it. Up till now, I have always used Agisoft Photoscan. So, if Linux has finally got a viable and reliable open source alternative, then I will be delighted.
If you want to know about Agisoft Photoscan, I can tell you all about that. Bear in mind, though, it is propriety software and is not cheap - even for the standard edition at 179 US dollars. Alternatively, give me a few days with Colmap, and I should be able to let you know what I think of it and how to use it
Okay. So, after loading up a sample image set and creating a project, Colmap crashes even on the first operation of feature extraction. It does this every single time and so I am not even getting past that point. After checking out this issue on the web, it is happening to loads of people and you must download and install the latest dev version. But, even after that, quite a few people are still having the problem as well as a number of other problems. Additionally, the dev version is not packaged as a deb and I have been down the rabbit hole of trying to install this kind of open source photogrammtry software before and it is a rabbit hole of dependency hell I am not prepared to go down at the moment.
Sorry about that.
Update:
Colmap is also available as a Snap in the snap repos. I have installed it and it appears to be fully working. Though, I will need to run through an entire feature extraction and reconstruction to be sure.
If you have already installed Colmap from the usual apt-get repos and wish to install the snap version, I recommend you completely uninstall and purge the existing Colmap, so as to avoid any confusion, with the following commands:
sudo apt-get remove colmap
sudo apt-get purge colmap
sudo apt-get autoremove
sudo apt-get update
When you have done all that, you can install the snap version with:
sudo snap install colmap-mardy
Once installed, you should find it in the Graphics menu.
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Okay, so about half way through processing a set of images. So far so good. It’s seems very slow compared to Agisoft Photoscan. But, I can live with that if it does the job.
One thing that looks very interesting is the capacity to run the whole process via a single terminal command that automates the entire process. Without any modifications to the command, it chooses all of the default options. But, they can be included as qualifiers in the command if required from what I understand.
Anyway, for the moment, I am using the GUI. But, when that is completed, assuming I don’t hit any problems along the way, I will try out the CLI method. I suspect it may be a bit quicker because it is not having to work out what to put on screen whilst it is doing the underlying work. But, that’s a guess.
In any event, once I have got fully to grips with this, I will post up a simple set of instructions.
Ok, final update.
Colmap is okay, but still not quite up to it for me, as compared to commercial programs like Agisoft photoscan. The issues, which vary in terms of how much of a show stopper they are for me, are:
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The convolution of the steps involved is much greater in Colmap as compared to, say, Agisoft Photoscan.
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Colmap does not allow for real-time viewing of the finished mesh. To view it, it has to be exported and viewed in other programs like Meshlab, for instance.
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Colmap does not seem to produce textures in the same way as Agissoft or other photogrammetry apps do. I am not entirely clear about how it does it, because I did not get that far in the process. But, from everything I have read on the web, people are not too happy with the way it does it in terms of the quality of the final output
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Colmap, in the dense reconstruction phase, requires a “CUDA-enabled GPU”. Apart from the fact I have not got a clue what a “CUDA-enabled GPU” is, it turns out mine isn’t. So, this was a show stopper for me personally. There are, apparently, other open source programs that can do this job by exporting the sparse reconstruction out from Colmap and carrying on the process from there. But, again, this is all just adding to the complexity of the process and the scope for things to go wrong.
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Thanks for getting back to me. I’m just trying your surgestions outP{spl}
Hi. been a while getting back to you. thnx for your help. I’ve got it working… just… it,s my photography that’s at fault now… so a work in progress… when I get the time.
