Photogrammetry of interiors 1

[milkshakelake]

I'm looking for an alternative to Matterport. It's a 3D photography solution that allows measurements and walking around. It has been tremendously useful on a few projects for structural inspections (I didn't do it myself, it was provided by clients).

My issue with Matterport is that it's severely limited by subscription fees. The subscription fees have a limit to how many sites I can do. I'm doing like 3-10 sites a week, so the costs will add up really fast if I do 3D photography on all of them. Right now, it's all with traditional 2D photography, but I run into issues with measuring things after the fact, and sometimes missing some shots. The other issue with Matterport is that if I stop paying the subscription, I lose the data. I want to own the data and process it myself.

Any alternatives? I was looking at some Leica systems, but they're really expensive and overkill for what I need this for. It's not out of my budget; I'll get it if it does what I need. But it also needs subscriptions for its software, and I really need to start going into a rabbit hole to find a way to use it without subscription. Maybe someone knows of a software I can purchase one time? Agisoft Metashape looks promising enough.

There's also the question of hosting the 3D photos to clients. Let's say I was able to process all the data myself. Is there a way to host it online myself, or it can only be viewed in-office?

I'm a bit lost here. Any advice would help!

 

[milkshakelake]

@dik Maybe it can make a 3D drawing, but not a 2D floor plan, which is the most useful thing.

@Brad805 Agreed with everything you said. The workflow to stitch everything together took pretty long, but the program I used has a Batch Process mode. So there is a possibility of streamlining it. But with 16 photos of just one room (very low amount), it took a really long time for my high end computer to do its thing. The program supports computations over the network to help it along, but it's just too much for too little. It might be useful on a massive project with a lot of weird site conditions, in which case I'll rent a Leica.

@SE2607 Good to know that there's a feasible solution for turning it into 2D. For now, I'm going old school methods, which is not the best way, but it's worked for hundreds of years.

 

[dik]

I've not used this lidar device, but the CAD program can take a 3D point cloud and convert it into a 3D drawing which, in turn, can be used to create a 2D drawing. I've only use the point clouds for creating 2D survey drawings from a point cloud and also for mine drift and shaft sections for work, also in 2D. I don't know what this device is capable of doing, or if it's a matter of the CAD software doing the work. I'm not a CAD operator, but I would think most CAD programs could produce a 2D floor plan from a 3D image... but dunno...

It was cheap enough that when I get some spare cash, I was thinking of picking it up... I'm into toys like this.

-----*****-----
So strange to see the singularity approaching while the entire planet is rapidly turning into a hellscape. -John Coates

-Dik

 

[Brad805]

I wish you luck with that workflow Dik. There are many reasons why the consultants doing the leg work maintain 10's of thousands of dollars in equipment and software that costs the same . I am sure you will find that out once you start the doing part.

 

[XR250]

For my projects which admittedly are not too large, laser distance measurer and pencil and paper work fine.
I find that the manual method gets me a lot more intimate with the project and helps me notice things that I may not notice otherwise.
It's frightening how much I remember about the projects when I do it this way. A lot of times I can recreate them in CAD without even looking at my notes.

 

[milkshakelake]

@XR250 The issue I have is missing measurements and photos. Unless you're the late Charles Thornton or something, I feel like there are times you're going to miss something. We're human after all, especially junior engineers being more human. Sending them back loses time and sometimes causes aggravation with the owners. I sent a senior engineer to a project 2 states away, and there's still missing stuff (though it's a pretty large project, so I don't blame them). 360 photos and measurements along with regular measurements would cover more of it.

 

[XR250]

I can see how geographical distance and employee experience would affect the type of workflow you are doing.
Honestly, I don't do projects more than 1 hour away just in case I have to make a return visit for something such as me missing a detail.

 

[dik]

Thanks Brad...I'm old and wobbly... but I like tinkering with things. It would not be used for any work purposes and would be just checking to see how it works and/or how well. Just another toy...

-----*****-----
So strange to see the singularity approaching while the entire planet is rapidly turning into a hellscape. -John Coates

-Dik

 

[Brad805]

Dik, I have went down those rabbit holes as well. I wanted to reverse engineer some small parts of my own needs so I bought one of the Creality scanners. These are quite reasonable, but are consumer grade. It did not work very well for some of the parts I wanted to scan. It worked well for small objects, but I wound up getting a much better scanner. Below is one of my test cases. That is a scan of a 40" tall garden gnome that was kicking around the house. The consumer grade solutions in this market must sacrifice a number of things to get the cost to work to sell units. The software seems to suffer the most.

 

[milkshakelake]

I'm hoping that it's a matter of time before the prices start coming down as it becomes more widely used. At that point, smaller outfits like mine can harness the technology and make it worthwhile business-wise. Leica seems to have this market locked down, and it's never good for us when there's no real competition. Though it seems like Trimble has something similar, but it's also crazy expensive.

 

[Brad805]

We are fighting an uphill battle. Many in our industry use that favorite line, the contractor will do that, or something along those lines. I get so frustrated with that attitude given so many parts are fabricated off site. This means few of our clients see little value in this, so it is not easy for us to get paid. The second problem is there is not a lot of firms our size wanting to use this tech, so we are a small market share. I have seen a number of very good pano host options for large construction firms, but they are targeting the mega sized construction firms that would never notice a few hundred bucks or thousands of dollars each month.

About 20 years ago we did a large renovation of an old brick building. We converted it into a multi-use building for the community. There were large areas of the floor that were cut out, stages added and several different things. During the design development stage I wanted to get a local survey company to complete a survey of the building for all on the team to use. I think I was quoted $15k or so. Not a chance would the architect go for that. We borrowed a robotic total station to collect some info we needed, but not having that at the start caused endless problems. The architect collected around $1mil in fees on that project. I am not sure much has changed since then.

 

[kissymoose]

milkshakelake, I am a few months behind you. Have you found a system you're satisfied with?

 

[Trenno]

We were given a presentation by Cupix yesterday. Very impressive software and sounds very expensive when they started explaining the $/GB subscription models, but the lack of ability to annotate a photo in realtime (i.e. taking a photo of missing bolt and tagging a voice-text note to it) makes it fairly redundant for the majority of our site inspections. Most of the time we try to issue the site inspection report to the Contractor before leaving site.

 

[milkshakelake]

@kissymoose Nope, I haven't found a system I like. What I'm using is regular photography and old school methods, plus a 360 camera on a tripod. The 360 camera gets me about 90% of the way there in terms of getting a ton of information that could be missed with 2D photography. But measurements can be missed, and engineers on site just have to be diligent, like in the old days.

If you do use a 360 camera, I don't recommend the typical ones on the market, like Ricoh Theta Z1. I tried that on real job sites. They have low megapixel resolution (not good for resolving things like bolts) and suck in low light. You want one of those rotating ones that take multiple exposures with high megapixel count. They exceed expectations in unlit environments. Like, even with one dim light in a dark cellar, you get a fairly clear view. It's kind of shocking. It does take a lot longer for the rotating 360 camera to take the long exposures in a dark environment, but it's worth the time. The spinny ones are a bit harder to set up and use compared to regular 360 cameras. The one I use is a little known one called Xphase Scan, but buyer beware, it's really hard to set up. The Matterport Pro 3 is better, but it's huge, so the portability factor goes down the drain. But regardless of what you use, some regular 2D photography with flash is always needed. The 360 photography is a supplement, not the main course.

Also, you don't need that many exposures with a 360 camera. About 40 shots on a typical job site (~4-6 story building) is enough. It takes 20-30 minutes to do, and you can do regular photography and measurements/sketches while the 360 camera does its thing. And you don't need to spend time to stitch them together into a virtual tour, or have a program do it and clean it up yourself, because we're not selling real estate here. The documentation is only internal for me. Engineers and draftspeople can easily figure out where each shot was taken.

 

[lexpatrie]

Docusketch?

 

[TLHS]

Trenno, do you have a good workflow for quick inspection report generation? My workflow is garbage and I haven't really found good software geared towards it.

 

[Eng16080]

I'll pile on here and say I'm also interested in some kind of interior mapping system which would ideally generate a 3d point cloud of a room/space. This would be very useful in aiding field measurements of existing building interiors and structural elements. Based on the responses above, it seems there aren't many/any affordable options for this.

I might try to build something for this purpose as a side project. I'm guessing this will be more complicated than I'm envisioning, but it might be fun to try. I'll report back here if I actually follow through with this and come up with something reasonable which others might benefit from, or if I come across an existing solution which meets our collective needs.

 

[milkshakelake]

@Eng16080 There are solutions that can meet our engineering needs, but they might not meet our financial needs. I tried a cheap solution (360 camera + one time fee photogrammetry software) and it just doesn't work. It's not useful in an engineering context. The results look kind of cool, but that's not worth a penny. The measurements are just completely off with this method; you really do need a Leica, which costs as much as a car. If you do figure this out as a side project, I think it can be very lucrative for you, either in your own practice or selling to others like me.

 

[GeorgeTheCivilEngineer]

Something that Obvis Ltd in the UK have is Reveal4D. But it hasn't been released publicly yet. They showcase it on their 'bridge of the month' articles like this one:

https://www.billharveyassociates.com/bom/138-melkington

It is designed for bridge modelling/surveying (and would have been very welcome when I used to do that sort of work) rather than building structures, but it does seem to be one of the only true photogrammetry engineer focussed developments out there.

(Mr Bill Harvey passed away a few years ago but his son now runs the business.)