P40 + iStar?

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P40 + iStar?

Post by mlang »

Hi guys,

I´m totally new into 3D-Scanning and need some advice. Coming from the field of airborne photogrammetry in archaeology we want to add a 3D-Scanner to our portfolio to provide the possibility to conduct all necessary documentation in the field work business. Our tests with terrestrial SFM was not very satisfying.
Because all our surveying equipment is from Leica and we are very pleased with their devices and their support we will go for a P40-station.
Now to my question: Our customers will ask for nicely textured models of their features. Will it make sense to add an iStar-Camera to our toolset or will the HDR-camera in the station will deliver sufficient results? I can´t find a comparison.
Thanks for your help!
Matthias
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Re: P40 + iStar?

Post by pburrows145 »

For the price I would add one anyway - great little tool to have in the armoury.

For the record the HDR is really good on the P40, but the field collection time will take longer than using an iStar: which is lighting fast, but then requires use of ColourCloud to add the imagery to exported e57 files from Cyclone.

Like I said, the iStar is 'a nice to have' and relatively low-cost. Nice group of guys to work with also, which helps.
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Re: P40 + iStar?

Post by Jamesrye »

Matthias,

We use an istar camera with a C10/P20 and it's great. Rapid image acquisition that doesn't require the "scanner dance" as you can image out of one side at a time to avoid getting in the images. Colour Cloud works a treat and the NCTech support is superb, those guys always respond to queries promptly.

If you do lots of roads or street scenes, you won't wan't HDR though as you will have lots of ghosting from passing cars. Istar also has a single exposure that is really fast. I think the built in camera on the Leica scanners still acquires the images in 'tiles', so if you have street scenes, you often end up with floating heads or arms from passers by.

There are some down-sides to it though. Currently, you have to have 'black skies' on the truviews as there are no points to colourise. There is a time-consuming work around for this, but it requires a lot of manual work and it's not ideal. Also, exporting the scans is a bit of a pain - but hopefully this will be addressed soon.

I'm not the best at creating animations of point clouds, but I recently did some scanning of a nice little church, which I coloured using istar imagery and animated using Pointools....


youtu.be/ecxCW6hWyjw

James
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Re: P40 + iStar?

Post by NTocher »

James, Great scan and overlay, thanks for sharing.
Neil.
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Re: P40 + iStar?

Post by pburrows145 »

Jamesrye wrote:Matthias,

We use an istar camera with a C10/P20 and it's great. Rapid image acquisition that doesn't require the "scanner dance" as you can image out of one side at a time to avoid getting in the images. Colour Cloud works a treat and the NCTech support is superb, those guys always respond to queries promptly.

If you do lots of roads or street scenes, you won't wan't HDR though as you will have lots of ghosting from passing cars. Istar also has a single exposure that is really fast. I think the built in camera on the Leica scanners still acquires the images in 'tiles', so if you have street scenes, you often end up with floating heads or arms from passers by.

There are some down-sides to it though. Currently, you have to have 'black skies' on the truviews as there are no points to colourise. There is a time-consuming work around for this, but it requires a lot of manual work and it's not ideal. Also, exporting the scans is a bit of a pain - but hopefully this will be addressed soon.

I'm not the best at creating animations of point clouds, but I recently did some scanning of a nice little church, which I coloured using istar imagery and animated using Pointools....


youtu.be/ecxCW6hWyjw

James
Nice work mate! :D
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Re: P40 + iStar?

Post by Attreyu »

"Our customers will ask for nicely textured models of their features."

Not colored pointclouds. But textured meshes.

Is this possible natively with any 3D scanner ? Because taking the RGB pointcloud and converting it to a textured mesh in Meshlab will not bear any decent results, unlike photogrammetry.
www.3deva.com - Digitalisation, Pointcloud to Mesh conversions, Virtual Reality
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Re: P40 + iStar?

Post by Jamesrye »

It is possible to transfer the RGB attribute information from the point cloud to the mesh using Meshlab:

http://meshlabstuff.blogspot.co.uk/2009 ... louds.html

I guess it doesn't look as good as photogrammetry because its done on a per vertex basis. So the mesh would have to be really dense to look nice. I've been testing out a program called Reality Capture to combine laser scanning and photogrammetry.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3aNUBckwnE


youtu.be/y3aNUBckwnE
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Re: P40 + iStar?

Post by Stelios K. »

Hello everybody and happy new year!

I use Leica P40 and I am thinking about combining it with iStar in order to add colour on the point cloud or on the mesh derived from the point cloud.

My question is about the pixel size of iStar or the focal length in order to calculate it as the level of detail is important for me.


Thank you in advance.
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Re: P40 + iStar?

Post by Ioannis »

Hello I am using Cyclone 9.3.0 and i want to colourize a pointcloud.
i go to images import option but i can import or see the file .nctri file why?
Ιn the import option files it has not anything that ends in .nctri file
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Re: P40 + iStar?

Post by steves01x »

Ioannis wrote: Thu May 09, 2019 12:10 am Hello I am using Cyclone 9.3.0 and i want to colourize a pointcloud.
i go to images import option but i can import or see the file .nctri file why?
Ιn the import option files it has not anything that ends in .nctri file
each stitched pano needs to be in its own folder for Cyclone to find it - use a little app called Files 2 Folders, this puts each image in to its own named folder then you can import
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