Photo assisted texturing, maybe in development pipeline?

Discussions Metro Series
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Hi all! I am a new Revopoint user, though experienced with scanning. I also have a couple of structured light Artec scanners ($20K for the scanner then $1.5K/year for the software) but am looking for a scanner that offers laser line scanning, and purchased the MetroY Pro. One thing that I have a niche but significant use case for is the use of photos to apply texture to objects. Even with the more expensive scanners, the texturing is “ok” from the scan, but Artec software allows for photos to be taken with a camera/cell phone, then the software auto aligns them with the scan and applies the camera-based textures to the 3D scan. The software process takes only a couple of minutes to do and the resulting texture is always beautiful.

I have seen a couple of workarounds on this forum using reality capture / blender / meshlab to do a similar thing but it seems time intensive. Does anyone know if Revopoint working on this sort of feature for more seamless photo-assisted / realistic texturing of scans?

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+1 from me. If Revo Scan or Revo Metro had this built-in it would be incredibly useful. Obviously this wouldn’t be a trivial upgrade for the Revopoint dev team!

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Agreed! But the nice thing is that it would be applicable to all scanners available in the software, providing better texturing to the entire product line. The way the other vendor’s software does it is this:

-Scan with the object in orientation A.
-Do not move object from orientation A, then take photos from different directions of the object with your camera. Save those images so you know they are from orientation A.
-Move the object as needed, now it is in orientation B. Take photos from orientation B and remember which those are.
-repeat for as many scan orientations you need to, to capture all of the texture information.
-In the registration/fusion phase you import those images per scan to get the camera angles. (A with A images, B with B images, and so on)
-In the texturing step all of those registered images then create the texturing.

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For the last 3 years I am trying to make Revopoint move in this direction , but until now , nobody really decided on that move so the answer is NO.

First of all , a photo textures are pointless in today’s rendering technology ( Game, movie, FX) , it was great in the 90’ rendering styles but today it is not and I dustry moved in total different direction so this kind of textures are totally not usable any more because it contains lighting and shadows and need to be heavy edited or used just for reference.

What is left is digital catalog, this type of textures are still very much usable , I mean here museums, archeology, preservation, online catalog presentation etc

Now the reasons , the point cloud can only have a color data info as much as the amount of points it have . Since each point represents a pixel . So having a 34 mega pixel camera capturing your photo will be as much usable as 2 megapixels camera photo, it can’t use its all data because not enough of points. So no matter how much megapixels you use , the color per vertex will be never optimal .

But then you have the actual photo texture , that can project the megapixels images direct to the UVs of the model , now for that you need to write a new fragment of the software , considering it is a free software and not $20K or with subscription that could be a problem , maintaining is expensive and nobody is about to create a free feature for everyone to use regardless they own a scanner or not.

That set Artec apart from this all . I am sure you would like not to pay $1.5/ over year on subscription to support all the features you want .

There is another option that could be made by designing a small device with a very good camera that can be connected separately to the software and used for that purpose with all scanners that support color data .
It would be cheaper yet provide the best option for both parties . You could easy generate 8K textures with excellent results .

I do texturing job for 30 years already and I go through it all phases , yet the best textures I ever got from a 3D scanner was 25 years ago , since then nothing moved really in this specific mapping technology and it is still the same as it was . If you don’t mapie it yourself mentally , don’t expect much . Thankfully this situation still keeps my job intact :pensive_face: and needed.

I hope I still see it one day from Revopoint when they run out of all ideas . But right now it is what it is , wishful thinking.

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Thanks very insightful! The Artec software seems to have no competition in this regard. Here is a great scan I did using the photo texture: Cloisonne Vase - 3D model by HoneyPoint3D (@nkloski) [4204e3a] - Sketchfab

I would love for there to be a more seamless way to get better textures on models than either paying that much money or using workarounds in software like reality capture.

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I so agree , Metro is not really build for capturing textures , is it there but that is not the type of scanner .

Why ? Because it uses blue light for scanning so capturing colorful objects is really pain with it as it do not see all colors under Auto Turntable . Metro series was build more for scanning mechanical parts or to use with 3D spray in general , scanning colorful objects with different color contrast will mess up with the accuracy and measurements .

For capturing colors are better infrared scanners like MIRACO Plus, Range 2, Pop 3 or even Inspire 2. And I have beautiful looking textures with it that you can check under my showcases .

But seriously we need separate universal capture device where we can plug in our cameras or phones of choice and texture it our ways , that is the next step in that direction . Even if that was separate software or device I have to pay it I would.

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i am sooooo grateful i have never needed texture in my line of work that and i have a red green color shift so i just don’t have an eye for it

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