PhotogrammetryWorkflows/VisualSFM CMVS-PMVS Meshlab
Note: I (Jacob Johnson, JJ) am currently working on Windows. I will try to leave some leeway in these instructions for other OSs by including the overall links where you can find software for those versions, but the most detailed instructions at first will be Windows until I get my Desktop back online with Ubuntu later and run through the process again for that, then document it.
Before going into the installation steps, here is a breakdown of what this set of software is doing / what we can do with it. This is what I have gathered so far, and it is still loose / rough around the edges. Please feel free to correct any mistakes I've made, or I will adjust as I learn more. VisualSFM takes in photos that you've taken around a 3D object and then runs an algorithm/program against them (SiftGPU, based on David Lowe's work - Chang Chang Wu wrote SiftGPU and VisualSFM) to find "feature points" (types of features in images that are easy to find in other images when the object is viewed from a different angle or distance) and from these, find the relative positions of where your camera was when you took each picture. Up to this point, it has performed "sparse reconstruction'. After this, it will turn to the CMVS-PMVS software (if you've copied it into the root VisualSFM install folder with the VisualSFM executable) to do dense reconstruction which involves finding many more features from the image data to fill out the point cloud. When you click on the dense reconstruction button, it'll ask you to provide a folder path where you would like it to save the results. Later, we will use Meshlab and open that folder/project. We will use Meshlab to construct a colored mesh around the point cloud. At that point, we'll have a 3D object with colors, but no texture (if you want fancy / any textures at all, that's not part of this process yet). Once that's done, we can open it with any modelling software (or the main open source one, Blender), as well as import it into a splicer program for conversion to gcode for 3D printing.
After searching among many videos on Youtube, I found a good one that documents the installation process here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEAbXYDzUjU I will include timestamps into this video for each step below. Note that where my instructions differ it has to do with getting Windows binaries rather than Linux versions.
Installation: 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEAbXYDzUjU&t=2m41s Download VisualSFM from this page : http://ccwu.me/vsfm/ (it has multiple OS versions, Windows, Linux, and MacOS, generally you'll want the 64 bit version - if that doesn't work you may have an old computer and need the 32 bit version) Installing this only consists of downloading the zip file and extracting it (there's no installer - once extracted, the executable is in the extracted folder and ready to run).
Next get CMVS-PMVS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEAbXYDzUjU&t=2m52s https://github.com/pmoulon/CMVS-PMVS Click on the green button to the top right of the repo file list "Clone or Download", then select the option to clone download as a zip file. Extract the zip file and navigate to the subfolder that has the version for your operating system (for instance, for Windows the path from the top level "CMVS-PMVS-Master" extracted repo zip file to the Win64 version is: CMVS-PMVS-master.zip\CMVS-PMVS-master\binariesWin-Linux\Win64-VS2010). Copy everything from that subfolder into the folder where you put VisualSFM (further questions on how / what files to copy, watch the Youtube video starting at the 4 minute mark).
Next get Meshlab: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEAbXYDzUjU&t=3m15s Yes, it's at SourceForge. They are no longer including adware automatically in all downloads. Grab the installer and install it.
Handling pictures: If you're using your cell phone, you'll want a way to easily get pictures from your phone to your computer so that you can run these apps on them to make the model. I had some initial difficulties, probably due to my phone being encrypted, where when I connected it to my computer, I could not see the phone's internal storage from Windows File Explorer. To overcome that, what I did was upload all the images to Google drive and installed Google Backup and Sync on my computer. Once you've uploaded photos to Google drive, when you sign into Google Backup and sync on the same Google account, it will download all of the files on Google drive to your computer. Its default directory is C:\Users\<YourUserNameHere>\Google Drive. I didn't do anything else with the files from there, only selected them in VisualSFM from where they were on my computer / where Google Backup and sync put them (see above). You may have to wait a few minutes after uploading for Backup and Sync to download all the pictures to your computer's hard drive. It will happen automatically as long as the app is signed into that Google account.
Running the pipeline:
VisualSFM steps: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEAbXYDzUjU&t=4m33s Open VisualSFM by going into the folder and double clicking the executable (the one with the green 'V' icon).
Open the images in VisualSFM: Click on the "Open Multiple Images" button (it's third from the left, just under the File tab in VisualSFM). Navigate to the location you stored your pictures on your computer (if you're using Google Backup and Sync, that's "C:\Users\Your User Name\Google Drive\Whatever you called the image folder"). Select all of the images by left clicking the first one, pressing shift and holding it down while you left click the last one. Finally, click the "open" button on the bottom right of that dialog window (while all the images still highlighted/selected).