A Brick Wall

 This past week does not bring any interesting photos of progress as this week was mainly a brick wall to my project which will be the focus of this blog post. This week was really busy for Emma Dietrich over at FPAN so we could not trouble shoot my problems together or exchange photos, prints, or artifacts.

With this known, my goal for this week was to fix a previous problem I had last week where I built the dense point cloud and the back half of the model was not there due to the program reading other spatial data within the photobox other than the model itself which tells it I am not moving around the model and thus confusing the program with conflicting spatial dots. There are a few solutions to this problem with the most prevalent being “masking.”

Masking is a feature where Metashape takes a single photo and identifies all the spatial data it can from the single photo and then ignores it every time it comes up in every photo in my selected profile. This works well on a turntable because it blocks out the static background so Metashape no longer has conflicting spatial data due to the turn table. I spent a good deal of time trying to get this process to work but only had marginal success. A unique feature to Metashape is its ability to automatically detect and apply masks across the whole profile based off of one image, however I later found out that the small rubber ridges on my turntable make it difficult for this process to work as intended. I had every photo masked yet the photos would no longer align (the first step in building the point cloud that eventually becomes the 3D model) which is why this week is a brick wall.

The black negative portions of each photo is the data that is ignored because it matches my fully masked static background. Note the white lines that are not the actual model that create the confusion during the aligning process.

Every problem I tried to solve brought me marginal success only to be stuck again with another, very similar, problem. I took three entirely new photo groups with different settings, and I tried masking in different methods just in case it was the original photo group that was the problem.

I have, however, pathways the circumvent this problem for the upcoming week. I can buy more lights and actually move around the model; this would be the most time-consuming method. I could also go through every single image in my photo groups and apply an individual custom mask to each photo, this method would be time consuming due to the volume of photos but perhaps not as much as moving around the model. The third way would be to apply white poster board to the top of the turn table to get rid of the texture and repeat the steps I took this week and if any problems occur, then I can edit the masks to touch up any areas that would be confusing for the program.

My goal for next week is to move past this problem and finally construct a full 3D model so I can start learning the process that makes that model printable with another program called blender.