Well, I can’t let the actual architecture folks have all the fun with this architecture stuff. I have a very…complicated piece of land, and we are hoping to put some detached offices for my lady and I in the back corner of our yard. Still in the conceptual phase, but here’s the idea currently:
I had laser scanned that site in the past, so I had very accurate information, but without any color. I have a good friend who has a cinema grade drone come out last week, and I spent the weekend playing around with different photogrammetry packages to see what I could get out of the stills we took. I found that new photogrammetry module in Substance Sampler is actually quite good, but ended up doing the real work in Metashape Standard Edition. The ability to produce both diffuse maps and bump maps is pretty amazing, and Metashape offers soooooo much more control, while only taking marginally longer to learn. Here’s the site data, minus the structure:
I was able to translate/scale/rotate the photogrammetry data on top of the laser scanned data, and so I got some incredibly accurate and very pretty data. Metashape is pretty damn rad, and the ability to use the terrain/foliage data from Metashape, with Substance materials for doing renderings is pretty sweet I gotta say. The reflections of the trees off the glass just makes me smile, straight up.
The scanner used to get the original data was a Surphaser, which is a pretty high end unit, but really for this type of work, any decent tripod scanner should work, and if you want to go this route you don’t need that much laser scan data, it’s just to precisely adjust the scaling of the mesh.
I should mention, that there’s some wayyyyy less high tech ways of doing this, that are probably quite valid if done right. Any reference measurement, provided it’s of appropriate size (bigger is better, less error) is a great way of scaling your data. In the absence of laser scanned data, I would have either placed two reference objects in the scene and measured the distance manually, or simple used something like the fence posts as reference. The detail and resolution you can get from Metashape is such that if I was scanning a building site that had a sidewalk in front of it, you could likely use a pair of distant spaced sidewalk cracks as reference. So if you get creative, a very long measuring tape might just do the trick.
Honestly Metashape is dead easy and you can do virtually everything you need to from the Workflow drop down. It’s just import photos, tie them together, build a mesh, build textures (I like diffuse and bump with foliage) and then export it out. I did TONS of playing around with the settings and seeing what looked good. I built everything from a 35M polygon version, down to a 5M polygon version. What I found is that the decimation is very nice, and so one hint I would give is to increase the size of your textures up to like 16k (but realize the TIFF/PNGs of this will get huge so maybe use JPEG for texture maps) and focus more on the quality of your texture than the density of your mesh.
I did some longer range drone shots yesterday, and then managed to composite the photogrammetry data and current conceptual model into a wider shot. Full disclosure, I have no idea how to Photoshop, but managed to get this after much button mashing/YouTube tutorial watching:
Hi Sky G,
What you are doing in integrating a design into a real environment is way beyond my capabilities, but I am following it with interest. I also read your other topic about refurbishing an existing building, where you did write about and showed the same detached offices as described in this current topic. So I was expecting to see that building in the aerial view somehow, be it the existing building or your 3D design, but I can detect neither…?
Ah we have LOTS of trees, and they are quite thick. And the oddest lot shape you’ve ever seen. If you look closely, you can see the roof of the main structure here:
I see something there, but I would never have identified it as your main structure.
Instead, I had seen the contours of a shed/garage in the scan shown in your other topic, and I figured it was the one on the left of your plot, with only the roof visible.
So I figured your house would be hidden behind the big tree(s) shown in between…
