UKC

I have been playing around with some photometry software, building 3D models of local crags. These are my first decent results - the new quarry, Avon.

http://www.spectral3d.co.uk/test/new_quarry/

You need a reasonably fast machine with good gfx card and a web browser that can do webgl.

I'm thinking of building a 3D topo tool on top of this and maybe mapping some larger mountain faces.

Spot the climber.

In reply to davidbeynon:

That's amazing! How did you map out the shape of the crag?

In reply to Greasy Prusiks:
You need to take pictures from lots of different positions. In this case I was walking down the road taking one every 5 paces or so.

You feed those into some software that figures out some matching points in the pics, uses those to work out where the cameras were in space.

Then it finds more matches and uses triangulation to figure out where the points are.

Once you have all that you can either draw points directly, which is what this is doing or you can turn them into textured triangles.

Triangles are faster to draw and take less memory for a given image quality so that's what I will probably do long term, but the point viewer was a free download so...

The software I'm using for the mapping is called photoscan: http://www.agisoft.com/

You need a ton of memory to run it unfortunately. Currently trying to reconstruct the sea walls from about 50 photos.

In reply to davidbeynon:

Thanks.
That's some impressive software. If I had the memory I'd be giving it a go.

Good luck with the sea walls.

In reply to davidbeynon:

Really quite impressive. Go you.

By "a ton of memory" how much are we talking?

In reply to John_Hat:

Well, a lot for a laptop but not much for a gaming rig or workstation. Currently running with 24gb which is fine most of the time but I can run out if I turn everything up to 11 with over 100 pics.

Software makes use of GPU compute stuff so a decent graphics card helps with speed.

My plan is to convert to textured meshes, as you can get away with simpler geometry with textures. Writing a webgl mesh viewer isn't hard - it's not far off what I do for a living.

I expect the moderately tricky bit will be getting the route overlays to look good, and the really hard part will be managing all the data.

In reply to Greasy Prusiks:

you only have to remember to take your camera . . . how hard can it be!

In reply to davidbeynon:

That is seriously impressive!

In reply to davidbeynon:

Think it would work well on mountains or crags that have climbing on different aspects, where 2d pictures, tend to be opened out flat images or drawings. Certainly worth a play to see.

Greasyprusiks:
Sea Cliffs, kayaking, problem solved.

In reply to summo:
I do have a kayak and a love of pembrokeshire... What I don't have is a waterproof camera and competence.

Also a correction. In the OP I said "photometry" Word is "protogrammetry". Late night brain fart.

In reply to davidbeynon:


I'm guessing you just need flat calm seas and maybe that a canoe is better than kayak for stability to get a good quality images. You use a boat, but that would just take the fun out of it. I know a few people who photographed crags around the gower looking for new routes years ago.

In reply to davidbeynon:

Well that made the fan run fast on my laptop. Couldn't spot the climber unless (s)he's to the left of the main buttress about halfway up with what looks like vegetation above and possibly a rope?

In reply to Rigid Raider:
When I get around to doing the topo stuff I will convert the crag into a form that is easier to draw and doesn't thrash peoples computers quite so hard.

The climber had the grotesque bad manners to move between shots so he is a bit indistinct/poorly reconstructed.

A light yellowish smudge just to the left of some vegetation about a third of the way along from the left.

In reply to davidbeynon:

This is awesome!!!

In reply to davidbeynon:

Not sure about the comments of it taxing processors I ran it fine on a Tesco Hudl2 tablet - it can't be that taxing.

I'm interested in how you did it though.... Is this just stitched pics or have you done some range finding with LIDAR etc?

In reply to balmybaldwin:

No special toys needed, just a camera and software. This was make from about 15 photos. It works by finding objects in pairs of pictures taken from different positions and triangulating.

In reply to davidbeynon:

Ah Ok, used similar stuff myself, on a much smaller scale

In reply to davidbeynon:

And the avon gorge sea walls.

http://www.spectral3d.co.uk/test/sea_walls/

There are some holes where the crag was hiding behind trees and I couldn't see onto ledges. Maybe I need to borrow a *****.