The tool to ‘resample point clouds from below’ seems very useful for cleaning up drone capture point clouds. I struggle quite a bit with this myself. The drone data is ~20cm accurate:
The problem is separating the terrain points from trees and bushes, it all looks the same to the computer:
In this workflow I need everything remodelled to help with documentation and uniformity. In some cases you need to remove some houses, lay a new road, plant some trees.
So it would be very useful to separate the terrain from the point cloud in this workflow. With the terrain in place, other key components can be modelled fairly easily by hand:
Sure, I used the DJI Mavic Pro and took about 500 images from above (450) and some angled (50). I uploaded the images to RealityCapture (recently acquired by Epic Games). They have a Pay-per-input model, which is payed at export. So you can upload and process the images to a model and do all kinds of edits. You can export unlimited variants, the cost is only based on the input (file size I guess). It cost me a total of ~$5. You can export satellite image (from above), point cloud, mesh, and a lot lot more. The quality was amazing considering I only had a few images.
Next time I would add a bunch of orbital images for key objects like the houses, at different angles. Also, I would fly a little more outside the area to capture the surrounding trees and vegetation. Perhaps supply with a bunch of photos from the ground. RealityCapture can take any kinds of photos and will figure it all out.
I’ve only done one flight so far, and I used DroneDeploy for planning, I had it on auto-pilot, so it took off and landed by itself. I think it’s quite expensive, but I had a 14 day free trial.
Next time I’ll probably use the native DJI app, and just navigate the drone manually. I think the auto-pilot feature is okay, but you can probably get something a lot better by just setting the image capture rate to ~1 image per 3 seconds and capture the area systematically from above and from different angles.
I’ll probably make a tutorial on my workflow next time, I think it’s a really good strategy for kicking off an architecture project.
Heighfield does not help very much, my image has a heigh varians of 55m, which I could not achieve with the Heightfield command. Just get a bunch of holes all over…
Thanks for the feedback and wish!
I made an height map thing once, I’ll revisit the code. But how do you get the height range data? And can you send me an example file so we compare with the same input?
I just read the contours and found the highest contour (bottom right corner) at 185m and lowest point (top left corner) at 130m, making a 55 meter difference.
Been struggling with Bison plugin all day to convert a 1.02GB GeoTIF to Mesh, but that’s another story
Right, but that’s not a height field image, it’s a shaded image of the terrain, with height lines. Unfortunately Rhino can’t natively read 32bit grayscale tiffs yet, so this has to be done through other libraries or tools. What I do though is download the pointcloud from høydedata instead.
Until 32bit grayscale TIFF can be read you could convert to EXR or HDR instead and use that. Personally I have used Blender for that, but any other tool that can do the conversion should be fine.
Good morning Holo. Wondering about your TerrainMesh plugin. I tried to get in to it a couple of years ago and didn’t have time. Now want to try again. What is the most efficient way to do it? Where do I download the latest version from and is there any kind of webinar available to explain it? Thanking you in advance.
Hi Cosmas, just install it through the PackageManager
If you haven’t tried that yet then just type PackageManager, search for TerrainMesh and install it. Restart Rhino.
Then select your curves and type TerrainMesh. It’s designed to handle bad inputdata so it divides curves into fixed values and the default value i 1 (as I always work in meters when handling terrains).
And that’s basically it. It can produce jaggy results if the lines are too close together in XY and far apart in Z, if so try a lower value and run reduce mesh afterwards.
Open PackageManager and install the update (you can search for TerrainMesh or use the “Installed” tab to find it. Then restart Rhino. Only change is that it now expires 31.12.2023 instead of 31.12.2022.
Huge thanks to Steve @stevebaer and Ehsan @eirannejad for making it possible to push an update to this plugin that I wrongly added to the packagemanager. You saved my life, so now I can add features. Stay tuned!
Open PackageManager and install the update (you can search for TerrainMesh or use the “Installed” tab to find it. Then restart Rhino.
What’s new: TerrainMeshUpdate is a new command that takes you directly to the packagemanager and searches for TerrainMesh so it is easy to update.
And when the plugin expires it will tell you to run that command, this way it is easy for new and inexperienced rhino users to update as well.
Hope you like it.
More changes will come next year.
