Photogrammetry from Beginner to Advanced with RealityCapture

Taught by Charles Chorein

Course Number:
RLC101
Software Version:
1.2 
Original Run Date:
May 2022 
Duration:
3 hours 58 minutes 
3D
new
In this course, taught by CG supervisor Charles Chorein, is a "getting up and running guide" which covers RealityCapture from a beginner to an advanced level.

Charles Chorein is a CG supervisor in London with 15 years of experience. He has been working in London since 2009 and has achieved various movies such as The Hobbit, Prometheus, The Hunger Games 2, Superman: Man of Steel, Harry Potter 7, Pirates of the Caribbean 4 and DespicableMe. He has more recently been working on TV shows and recently finished Dark Crystal for Netflix.
 
Photogrammetry from Beginner to Advanced with RealityCapture
Watch our overview of the course

Class Listing

Class 1: Basic Workflow

A dive inside the RealityCapture interface, including coverage of all the basic steps to be able to create our first photogrammetry from scratch. UI and layout are covered, as well as preferences, navigation, and how RealityCapture is organised. You will learn how to use the photos to obtain the correct photogrammetry mesh reconstruction.

Class 2: Draft, Normal, High mesh with Texture

One of our requirements is the need to create different LOD ( Level-Of-Details) to adapt our outputs for Maya, Blender or Unreal. An exploration of how important the "con" window is to understand each step of the photogrammetry process, adjusting cameras and image size in the “3D” window, how to orient and adapt the bounding box, and how to export the model and texture to your 3D software of choice.

Class 3: Control Points and Measurement

In some cases, your photos will not be aligned perfectly on one single component in RealityCapture and you will need to add manual control points to link all your components together to create a single object. In this class, you will learn how to add control points and help Reality Capture create a single mesh with all pictures on a single component. Also, based on measurement, you will learn how to scale the mesh with the Create Distance tool.

Class 4: Mesh clean up and ZBrush

Once you are satisfied with your mesh, you will likely find some residual geometry around. You will learn how to fix this with RealityCapture's smart tools to clean up, delete triangles, and simplify the geometry. For our human example where topology is very important, we will use Zbrush to see how easy is it to re-create a topology with the ZRemesher tool.

Class 5: High Resolution Street Facade

Armed with a basic understand as to how RealityCapture works, we go deeper into the alignment and reconstruction settings. With the “con” window, we explore each step of the process to get a very high mesh density with 86 million triangles

Class 6: Street Facade and Texture Quality Level

Based on our mesh and texture, we will see if we require only one UV tile or UDIMs for the texture quality in Maya, Blender or Unreal. An exploration of settings for texture resolution and how many UDIMs we require in the end.

Class 7: Merging photos and a LIDAR scan

In our next example, we go through the methodology to merge two components. One will be traditional photogrammetry with photos and the other a LIDAR scan. An explanation of how to export and import “rcalign” files and how to merge them into a single RealityCapture project.

Class 8: Georeferences

Most drones save GPS information as EXIF data in the files. RealityCapture offers an amazing tool to read that data and geolocalise each picture in 3D space. The Wizard Tool is also covered, which provides the opportunity to create multiple maps and geometry optimizations based on different settings.

Class 9: CLI Scripting, Part 1

Another interesting aspect of RealityCapture is the ability to create scripts with the CLI, containing all the steps as a simple “bat” file on Windows. Instead of doing everything manually, we will create a script and learn how to look for each command in the documentation to do everything for us in the background when the script is running.

Class 10: CLI Scripting, Part 2

Improving the script and exploring how can we can get even more steps, mesh definitions, and how save our file into different folders or projects based upon variables.