Which photogrammetry tool is the best ? (3DF Zephyr, Metashape, Reality Capture, Meshroom)

What is your specs ?

Cool video, but for the perfect comparison there would be great to take the shots during the overcast.

i think the comparison would be more precise if u had single rendern engine for all 4 models, furthemore there are a lot of settings that can be tweaked during the process of aligning photos and camera positions, in all programs that can misslead the final result
great video tho)

You should compare the point cloud not the mesh, since mesh can be done with many different parameters from the original point cloud

Hi. I'm only just becoming familiar with photogrammetry, so I REALLY appreciate the time you took to produce this video review comparison. It was extremely enlightening.
Regards Mark in the UK

Just a tip for the cinematic shots at the beginnig. Buy a ND Filter Set for the Mavic so you can use the 180° rule for your shutter speed. The shots look really "jittered" because you used a really high shutterspeed.

A point barely mentioned, GPU usage. Nvidia support doesn't help if your workhorse PC has an AMD GPU.

Why not redo the Meshroom test instead of just putting it into the video with faulty parameters?

Very good explain and comparison ❤

In metashape the best results come from tweaking...

Just a comment as a professional photographer: the green on the more outside bits under of the model is because sunlight bouncing upwards off the grass is green. That’s more just something you learn as a photog after doing it for 20 years. Your own brain has auto white balance and you won’t notice it often.

Metashape is a forbidden 403 so that’s not installable anymore

I agree with you it's a very interesting job, but with reality capture you can get much better results.

Thank you for making this video, it is very informative. Once you come to the comparison of the four apps side-by-side, your focus is on the features. That many images aligned, so many triangles produced... But more important is how do you overall like the end result? It depends on the application of the model of course, but taking everything into account which package would you go with to model existing buildings, with a good, detailed, small-scale texture, to allow lighting to be added once the model has been made and imported in 3D design software? Thanks.

Où est-ce exactement ?
Merci

Hy, Jerome, can DSM (Digital Surface Model) by using stereo satellite image which has only two pair of image in it using meshroom like metashape and envi or erdas for that matter can provide, if yes can you provide me with a steps or resources to achieve my goal, since I don't really have much experience in Coding and all the open sources methods involves coding, meshroom looks promising but i have my doubt i don't want to waste my money ordering satellite imagery before conforming the process.

Metashape has two big flaws: it's idiotic viewport navigation (a moronic sphere) and in some cases incorrect texture generation. It also has several other drawbacks, including the high price. Otherwise, this is the best program for photogrammetry! However, I got pretty good results in the VisualSFM program, but this is on one condition: when there are foreign objects around the subject, so that the program can identify the object in space.
Meshroom just takes an awfully long time to render a scene (in most cases, up to 10 times longer than other programs), and the result is rather mediocre.

What about LumaAi?

Thank you so much

Great video for the newbies in the photogrammetry world! Thanks for the thoroughly comparison and keep the good job. i’m a civil engineer and usually work with lidar scans for field surveys of buildings. Can you tell if all the models that you make could be usable for measurements of element dimention and distances?. The lack of detail in the barn truss in meshroom model seems to be a negative point. Do you believe that using the doble of resolution could bring this elements into the model?. Thanks again for the great video 🎉.

ty for the comparison.
27 4k (216 mpix) textures is only "double" from 4 x 8k textures.. yes.. they are so many either way

Hi, thank you for this great comparison! Not directly related but to the process: instead of taking multiple single photos, how about taking a clip and splitting it into photos later. The resolution of each might be lower but the amount of information might be override this. I would be interested in hearing your thoughts

what about nvidia nerf

Thank you for exclusive quality video

I think you didn't capture the texture on Metashape at all. The colors you see are just the vertex color. So the comparison is not relevant...

what are your pc specs?

Can you give me the original video of the drone and let me try another software for mac

Thank you for the testing, but the verbal conclusions had almost zero value. Reality Capture is the king of all as seen from the Video Captures. Spitting out numbers does not speak of quality, of which RC is the absolute beast. Dedicated talk on edge quality, geometry quality (straight edges when there) is the most important thing, as well as texture tone quality (the way the software outputs colour and shadows/highlights). Leaving out edge and surface quality is like talking only to people that will retopologize the entire model, which is 1% of the users, at best.

can you make a video tutorial for the shooting process only?

Will this process work on a very large object, like a small mountain?

What program did you use for displaying the model and how did you export it? I can’t seem to be able to display it like this

Connaitre les specs de ta machine serait utile pour interpréter les temps de rendus, bravo pour le reste!

Lol Didn’t even filter point cloud didn’t use rtk or GCP so data is useless and also your supposed to mask the sky out abso crap

OpenDroneMap! Best bang for the buck!

Great video. As I was waiting, I thought that it it would be really cool if, next time you compare software or other things, you could have each software's stats (time to generate the model in this case) over the video of the respective softwares instead of as columns from left to right. It would also allow you to update the data on screen making watchers more engaged.

Useless...you are clueless about what the softwares offer and then dare to come to conclusions...what a waste of yours and ours time

A beautifully produced video. I’m keen to see future more in-depth videos on how to use the individual programs

Thanks for such nice and fun to watch comparison :), cheers!

Ok, the photos --> crappy high-poly mesh is an interesting step, but much more important is the crappy mesh --> usable mesh + texture. Can you do a review of level of automation and quality of this step for diff packages?

Hiw can I compare if you lower the quality of the last program how silly

This is an interesting video but it's impossible to make a choice based only on you using each application with the default settings. It would be much more useful to see a comparison after you have got used to the software and used more optimal settings. It would also be very useful to know your PC specifications, especially CPU and memory, to get an idea of approximately how long processing might take on a different system.

Would you consider redoing the processing with the same dataset? Thank you.

Phantastic Review! Thank you for all your time and effort. Cheers Martin

Thank you for the introduction to photogrammetry. Now I have a basic understanding thanks to your efforts. Nicely done sir!

Awful comparison.

What about pix 4D! Please could you try that as well

I just started the video and noticed that you were shooting at f1.7 which gives you a very shallow depth of field and makes it tough for the programs to recreate a sharp image. I would try f8 and raise your ISO so you keep at least 1/200 shutter speed. I think you will find great results.

Not a mention of PIX4D ! shame !

worthy! your system specs would be of interest, too. Ram, Proc, Cuda cores for example.

Great video !! I have a question, I have done a render with Meshroom, and have all the maps with the mesh, etc... on my drive.
But when I load the mesh file on 3d Online Viewer it only shows me the grey version. I can't seem to understand how to export or upload my project online (for free preferably). Just curious if you use Sketfab or any other particular viewer like in this video?