Leica RTC360 Reality Capture Solution

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Re: Leica RTC360 Reality Capture Solution

Post by Ioannis »

What is your opinion RTC 360 or P40?
If we done a 200-300 scan job with RTC we will have enormous file sizes that we can not manage them in office flexible. In the other hand P40 is less manuverable in field but it has normal file sizes without images.
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Re: Leica RTC360 Reality Capture Solution

Post by gsisman »

topogeo wrote: Mon Oct 15, 2018 10:01 pm X who wants raw data from RTC360 ..
Here is a link to download 4 scans ..

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1GjxQE ... Luaqt8l8ml

I downloaded other work done with RTC360
40 scans 6mm / 10mt all with HDR
(load time always
63 gb raw data from RTC360 (!!!)
7.1 gb .lgs
25.0 gb project Recap.

To reduce the size and processing time would be very .. very .. very useful that Leica would add the Hdr yes / no option.

On this work (house in the countryside along a road) I have tested three aspects:
1) VIS in the presence of a lot of vegetation
2) difficult C2C registration (few buildings shared between scans)
3) movable objects in the scan (vehicles on the road).

1) moving inside a forest .. the VIS has maintained the connection between the stations! .. (even though, in Register 360 it was not possible to register the connection due to the lack of common surfaces). I did NOT use Cyclone Filed.
2) with difficult C2C situations (few common objects) the automatic registration in Register 360 seemed perfect (scraps 5-8 mm) ..però .. it was WRONG: 30-40 cm of error on the targets. By doing the manual recording, using the function that allows you to delete the scanning areas to NOT use them in the C2C (great feature!) .. the errors are gone. In practice, for security, it seems to me that you always need to do the manual recording ..
3) I used the DOUBLE SCAN function. the weather in the countryside is still very good (2 min 42 sec for 6 mm / 10 mt) .. but the results are LOWER than the expectations: the cars or people in fast movement are not completely eliminated .. (see the attached photos) ).

Piercarlo
Thanks for the link Piercarlo, however , it was a dead-end link for us. Maybe it expired- I just saw this, been very busy
If you could post a new on or private message me.
Thanks for the info on double-scan as this is very important to us in very busy suburban Wash. DC area

Thanks for some more details the VIS/Registration capability with little overlap. I was really wondering about this. We are going to perform several tests like this. We're getting ready to rent an RTC for a month to scan a bunch of some parking lots & parking garages and other sites.
My concern is the file size loading time due to images and what you stated about the tie to targets errors.
We've used a BLK360 which has some image issues of it's own and image/scan overlay issues.

The more detailed images are critical for this project, so I'm hoping the "patina" that some have noticed is not prohibitive.
In your scans, how does the 5 level HDR come through to the HDR auto-light slider or the same in Jetstream file (if you have it)?
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Re: Leica RTC360 Reality Capture Solution

Post by topogeo »

Thanks for the link Piercarlo, however , it was a dead-end link for us. Maybe it expired- I j
Unfortunately, I need to clean up the space in the cloud that I use for the shares.
The old link is no longer valid.
Use this:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=12PY5n ... j3xo_WrX-W

It is the whole project:
- .rtc360 file
- folder with the raw data of the RTC360 laser scanner
- txt file with the coordinates of the targets detected with GPS
- PDF file with a graph of the scans, links and position of the targets


The scans on the road (27-28-30-31-32-33 and maybe 34) .. were made with the "double scan" function activated (to remove moving objects).

The targets are many .. but we needed to evaluate the accuracy of the RTC360 even for individual sections.

I await your observations with curiosity ..


Piercarlo
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Re: Leica RTC360 Reality Capture Solution

Post by EDF-DIPDE-Lyon »

hello,

Does anyone can share an equirectangular jpeg in "432Mpx résolution" ?

Do you think it can be usable against a panorama with a professional photograph with canon 5D MkIV @28mm ?...
Frédéric FAGUET
Land surveyor - technical scanning lead
EDF - Nuclear engineering division
Lyon - France
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Re: Leica RTC360 Reality Capture Solution

Post by Phill »

Hey All

Is anyone importing RTC scans straight into Cyclone (without 360). I've got an older but reasonable spec'd machine (16 gig ram). Cyclone seems to take up all that ram when importing (even in safe mode) and it's currently importing one scan every two hours. So for the possible 100 scans per day it's going to take.... 8.5days to import 1 day of data. Also with the partial import I cant seem to import single scans, just an entire job, so I cant machine share the data and then put it back together. Maybe I'm the only one who isn't using 360.

Possibly missing some setting, or 16gig of ram is no longer enough (however we had it going on a machine with 32 gig and that would reduce the import time down to 4 days per 1 day of scanning).

Cheers

Phill
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Re: Leica RTC360 Reality Capture Solution

Post by jmiller2103 »

Phill wrote: Mon Nov 12, 2018 8:10 pm Hey All

Is anyone importing RTC scans straight into Cyclone (without 360). I've got an older but reasonable spec'd machine (16 gig ram). Cyclone seems to take up all that ram when importing (even in safe mode) and it's currently importing one scan every two hours. So for the possible 100 scans per day it's going to take.... 8.5days to import 1 day of data. Also with the partial import I cant seem to import single scans, just an entire job, so I cant machine share the data and then put it back together. Maybe I'm the only one who isn't using 360.

Possibly missing some setting, or 16gig of ram is no longer enough (however we had it going on a machine with 32 gig and that would reduce the import time down to 4 days per 1 day of scanning).

Cheers

Phill
Hello Phil,

My company directly imports into cyclone register core module with the RTC360 and find that a medium scan no images! takes less than 1 minute to import per scan and with images this time does double and obviously create extremely large files. So my advice is to only take photos when deemed necessary. I would definitely take a look at upgrading your machine our machines have at least 32GB ram 1TB SSD or above and all have i7 processors at a minimum, we have also noticed the the more cores your machine has the faster the import, our desktop is considerably faster than our laptops (half the time of import) we have yet to time unifying times or exports but we assume it would give the same result. We have found by investing in our machines we can dramatically save time and resources and work more efficiently.

With the part time import unfortunately I believe this is still greyed out and unavailable,something that Leica may be able to fix in their new release. We use cyclone core as we feel as though we have more control over the database however with the RTC we have found that errors shown in the registration process nearly always come out at 0.000mm error and with investigations in the database we have found this to be wrong the majority of the time.

A Major bugbear that we are finding in numerous jobs is that on import into cyclone register the scans are coming in at an angle whether its 10,45 or even at 90 degrees we have had them all. We have tried deleting and re importing all the way back to the raw but with the same result. The only way then to fix this is with the old fashioned 3 point pick in that lovely wizard. Whats even more infuriating is that the scan data is the raw file within the database looks correct but when imported into a registration it seems to lose its orientation. I feel like there are a number of bugs when importing the raw RTC files into cyclone core register whether the scans are angled, show no error, loose their chronological order and unable to partially import. We are having to constantly having to come up with solutions to work with the RTC360. It is a great scanner and is extremely fast and produces some excellent data, it just has some registration issues that need to be looked into, (as this time now spent fixing registrations and re importing is eating into the time that it gained in the field) and this seems to be a software issue rather than the scanner.

I would love to hear how everybody else is finding the RTC workflow, and if anyone has had similar experiences or solutions to some of these issues.

Jay
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Re: Leica RTC360 Reality Capture Solution

Post by jamesworrell »

jmiller2103 wrote: Tue Nov 13, 2018 3:19 am I would love to hear how everybody else is finding the RTC workflow, and if anyone has had similar experiences or solutions to some of these issues.
Still refining our ideas .. but currently we do a "draft" registration in 360 - cloud links, overlap etc - then bring in to Cyclone Core to finish targets, mixing with other sensors etc. But each job is different. No doubt we will do it a completely different way next week.
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Re: Leica RTC360 Reality Capture Solution

Post by Jamesrye »

I've just finished a project using the RTC360. It's incredibly fast in the field, though data import (as others have mentioned) is painfully slow - especially as I'm writing to a non-SSD drive. With images, each scan is taking something like 15mins to import. I've ordered an SSD now, which will hopefully improve the import to 5mins per scan.

Speaking of the images, they are very good. However, there are some issues. Everything takes on a pastel hue and there are no real options to edit - so far as I can see, you can just adjust the brightness and contrast of each cube (using Cyclone - not register 360). It's a real shame. I've done some comparisons with the low resolution iSTAR (left side) and you can see the detail improvement. These were taken in roughly the same place.
istar_compare.jpg
You can see that the tone mapping is better with istar (left side). I'd love to be able to get hold of the full resolution panoramic imagery from the RTC360 - for pano tours and for editing. I've done some road scans and the HDR has caused some weird effects with passing cars - something we could probably fix if we had access to all the bracketed pictures. Note - the image detail is all there in that archway, but you have to increase the brightness by a lot to see it. If you adjusted all the cubes, the highlights would be blown out in other parts of the image.
istar_compare2.jpg
The visual alignment worked very - I will update with some figures to show the difference between using vis and cloud links vs using vis, cloud links and targets. A few improvements on the software side and this could be great :)
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Re: Leica RTC360 Reality Capture Solution

Post by Phill »

Thanks Jay

It must be an IT issue at our end.

Cheers

Phill

Edit: It looks like it was our computer systems still using the Windows 7 operating system that was causing the problem, for those playing at home.
Last edited by Phill on Wed Nov 14, 2018 7:43 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Leica RTC360 Reality Capture Solution

Post by gsisman »

Jamesrye wrote: Tue Nov 13, 2018 10:16 am I've just finished a project using the RTC360. It's incredibly fast in the field, though data import (as others have mentioned) is painfully slow - especially as I'm writing to a non-SSD drive. With images, each scan is taking something like 15mins to import. I've ordered an SSD now, which will hopefully improve the import to 5mins per scan.

Speaking of the images, they are very good. However, there are some issues. Everything takes on a pastel hue and there are no real options to edit - so far as I can see, you can just adjust the brightness and contrast of each cube (using Cyclone - not register 360). It's a real shame. I've done some comparisons with the low resolution iSTAR (left side) and you can see the detail improvement. These were taken in roughly the same place.

istar_compare.jpg

You can see that the tone mapping is better with istar (left side). I'd love to be able to get hold of the full resolution panoramic imagery from the RTC360 - for pano tours and for editing. I've done some road scans and the HDR has caused some weird effects with passing cars - something we could probably fix if we had access to all the bracketed pictures. Note - the image detail is all there in that archway, but you have to increase the brightness by a lot to see it. If you adjusted all the cubes, the highlights would be blown out in other parts of the image.

istar_compare2.jpg

The visual alignment worked very - I will update with some figures to show the difference between using vis and cloud links vs using vis, cloud links and targets. A few improvements on the software side and this could be great :)
Jay

We are using a rental RTC360 at the present time and are in the middle of an entire Parking Garage scan.
We use Cyclone Register 360 I agree the time in the field is FAST, but we've been cutting our teeth with little bugaboos. Importing multiple scan groups/bundles into the project.
If you start a new day in the same project (if you haven't run out of space on your RTC key, you can continue picking up the registration on the Field 360 app where you left off. If a new job or different key is used, it starts a new job and it has lost the registered links from the first day and you are starting a new bundle.
If you have started a job and download it the first day, and then add more to it the second day, there doesn't seem a way to ONLY import that second days work-if you want to use the VIS Field 360 pre-registration links.
Because we have two workstations and two guys processing on shifts, We generally download directly from the key to the NAS- non SSD (1GB network card and connection) and then work on importing from there onto our local Workstation SSD drive with the project. That has taken about 10 minutes a scan at medium Resolution with HDR for the import process using this NAS to SSD method.Then relocate the project to the NAS
We would like our projects to be created and worked on- the NAS but have had permissions issues even between users with the Register 360 Project Library database-since it is housed only LOCALLY on the local machine that created the project- instead of in a central network location (kind of like the Survey Databses in Civil 3D- if you're familiar with that.)
One irritating thing is it appears the tree of data in the left import panel is not in chronological order the way you ran the scans even though it looks put together right and the links look in the right order in the View panel. No way to re-sort it either.
They suggest in the latest help file, using one site map per floor for multiple floor scans and that means that you have multiple jobs you would start on a key that you would then import and clean up any registration issues before combining these multiple floors into one complete composite building bundle.
I see the wisdom in this for clarity sake. It gets pretty messy if you don't and without limit box capability in Register 360, you have to rely on this.
This is an import of 90 setups and I'm going home. Hopefully it will be done in the morning.
REG_360_import_secaond_batch_of_scns_non-order_Field_360_links_2018-11-13_1739.png
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