Capturing 3D spaces without photogrammetry
A.K.A. How to save space, time, & money
Photogrammetry is an amazing technology. If you really want to grab a snapshot of an area and turn it into a 3D model, photogrammetry is one of the best ways to ensure your model is as detailed as possible.
But it does come with its challenges.
1. You need to take a staggering amount of photos
If you want to capture a space using photogrammetry, best practice is to secure all possible angles of that space. The more photos you take, the better. At the very least, you’ll need to take photos every few feet. And that can take a lot of time.
2. You need to spend hours on site
If you value your time, then it’s not ideal to spend so much of it taking multiple shots of the same static space. The light’s probably not going to look the same throughout the day either, and that’s going to affect your model’s final quality.
If you’re trying to capture a commercial space, taking so much time could even be risky. Imagine being hired to document a newly opened hotel, and trying to keep the lobby, and then the bar, and then the pool clear until you’re done taking your photos. The longer you take, the more money your clients lose, and the less attractive your service becomes.
3. You often end up with incomplete or incorrect data
Your photogrammetry software needs time and a lot of computer resources to process all your photos. It may take days. And you can’t really preview the end result, all you can do is wait until the software is done with its thing.
And what if, at the end of all that, you realize that the resulting mesh surfaces are unusable because of errors in the surface calculations due to reflections and refractions? It doesn’t take much to introduce lots of noise in surfaces.
Then you’ll have no choice but to retake the whole thing again, which cycles you back to problems #1 & #2.
4. You’ll need lots of disk space
So you’re finally done capturing your model. Since you’ve gone through so much trouble to produce it, of course you’ll want to save it.
But remember that huge amount of photos you had to take? Now the photogrammetry software has added a few hundred million triangles of 3D noisy mesh data as well.
All of that data, the important bits and unnecessary bits, will have to be stored somewhere, either on your computer or your cloud service. That’s why generating photogrammetry models is a quick way to rack up the storage costs and slow down your computer.
So what’s the alternative?
Try using Metareal Stage.
Metareal Stage is a SaaS web app that lets you turn 360 panoramas into 3D models, without any photogrammetry involved.
So by using Metareal, you can:
- Take as little as one photo per room
- Reduce time on site
- Preview your model as you go
- Only store necessary data
But how does Metareal work without photogrammetry?
Good question. And to answer it, let’s try a little thought experiment.
Imagine you have a stack of papers.
Now what you want to do, more than anything else in the world, is to shape them into paper houses.
You don’t want just simple paper houses though. What you want are exquisitely detailed 3D models, a feast for the eyes down to every single furniture in every single room.
Where do you even start with that?
Well, one way to go about it is to fold your sheets of paper up into little boxes.
One box makes one room.
If you want to change the shape of the room though (maybe you want to make the floor a triangle instead of a square?), just change the way you fold. Want to make it bigger? Use more sheets to extend the room.
Add whatever miniature furniture you want to each room, cut out panels for doors and windows, then join your boxes together.
And just like that, you’ll have a paper house.
Metareal works exactly like that.
Think of your 360 panorama as a flat sheet of paper.
To give it more dimension, all you have to do is fold it up.
First, let’s make sure the room is actually flat, because we can’t fold it properly if it looks like this:
Just use the alignment tool to straighten your photo out.
Once that’s done, trace where the floor and walls are, so we know exactly where to fold.
Then mark out where your furniture is, so the software knows those areas should be 3D too.
Next step is to cut out portals for where the doors and windows are.
And now you have a room!
You can add more photos if you want to see the room from more angles, but just one photo is enough too.
Now all that’s left to do is build your other rooms, and snap them together.
And here’s your 3D model.
As you can see, the beauty of Metareal is it lets you customize your model quality.
Is time more important to you than quality? Then take a minimal amount of photos, and don’t bother reconstructing small pieces of furniture into 3D.
Is quality more important to you than disk space? Then take 8k photos from every angle you can think of, and make sure the tiniest spot in your tour is crystal clear 3D.
Want to learn how else you can customize your model building process? Read this:
Besides that, it only takes a few minutes to build a room with Metareal. So you can preview your room on site, and make sure you have all the photos you need before leaving.
The 3D mesh Metareal places over your photos is also much lighter than what you’d get with photogrammetry, so you can build a lot more models before running out of space.
Best of all? Metareal automatically turns your 3D models into floorplans and 3D virtual tours.
Want to give it a try?
Just go to www.metareal.com, and sign up for a free account.
Happy modeling!
