Hello all,
 
  We recently released IM3.5 on Mac and PC. New minor versions will be added regularly that correct bugs, extend export capabilities, or improve usability and productivity of the actual features. Check the customer area of this site to be sure to get the latest version of IM.
 
Thus, we are interrested to know what you would like to see in the next versions of ImageModeler: what improvements and which new features do you expect ?
 
Rendering ? Exports ? Panorama calibration (SW like)? More calibration constraints ?
All suggestions are welcome...
 
Regards,
Stef

Hi, I would like to know if IM support saving the undistorted images after the calibration. It would be paramount importance to post processing. If it doesn't, can I manually do it now with 3.5.1? Thanks
 
-Aaron

Hi,
 
  Not directly. In IM distortion is a parameter of the cameras computed.
I am afraid that even the exported cameras (for Maya, Lightwave, 3ds, ..) does not keep this information, or am i wrong ???.
 
A "hand" solution could be trought texture extraction, as the texture generated are undistorted... Create a 3d face (while locked on your camera) and extract the texture to get the undistorted image as the result of the extraction.
 
Hope it helps,
 
Stef

Hi, as far as I remember there is a tool in MatchMover 2.5 called DistoIma.exe which can do the undistortion but it requires some parameters in rz3 file. My interest is to save the undistorted photos based on this tool. Any ideas?
 
-Aaron

Hi, There
 
You asked, here it is....
 
Yes more ways to do the calibration faster and better.... sometimes I go nuts with that one .... Like Last time 2/3 of locators were green and it calibrated pretty fast.... so I am thinking well, lets add more locs. to improve it, but because it was taking some time to recalculate each time I was adding a new one, I turned Progressive calibration Off, then after putting something like 10 new ones, I pushed the calibrate button...... jeeeez almost all turned RED, Images were disappearing random, and it was impossible to have at least one back to even yellow....
 
Also the modeling tools are somehow a bit slow and outdated.... sorry but (maybe a bug) to merge all faces of a disc, I had to select them 2 by 2 in order to merge the faces... and the 2 last ones did not want to merge.... is it normal procedure ??
 
On the win 2000 IM, the N command does not work

To be able to Export the final model as an .STL file.

we also need a better way for setting the world space.....

Some instability issues (freezes, wooow) on the win2000 Image Modeler 3.5.1, when using the "esc" command (not all the time)
"N" or "n" does nothing, but that's not a big deal....

Hi,
 
About the world space tool:
 
We thought about splitting this tool into 2 separate ones:
- defining the origin and the main axes in one tool (with possibility to split origin and axis definition)
- defining the reference distance in another tool
 
Other ideas or propositions ?
 
Thanks,
 
Stef

Yeah, not bad, also some "lock_up Calibration" would be a really good idea....  
 
I am modelling houses, and so lots of blocking areas, and because of it, lots of pictures.... but the fact is that if you calibrate with more than four pictures, it becomes a pain very fast... so a lock to avoid re-calibration after adding more pictures....
 
Also, a sort of bolean operation (for round windows in walls for example) and a sort of rail extrude would be a +, often I'll have to model front house garden doors, or outside banisters, and often those are curved.....
 
Cheers

If anyone from realviz, I do have a question.... I am doing calibration with more or less 4 pictures , all shot with a sony f707. So the resolution is about 2500*1900, what thresold in the pref. do you advise..? I mean getting errors less than 1.5 to 1.9 is a real challenge, so almost all locators are always Yellow, does it matter...with 2.5K images...? I know I could make them all green increasing in the prefs, but it would still be the same (exept for the colors... euh... green yes...!!) Myabe shooting a simple object well lit with nice markers will do the "less than a pixel", but buildings outside, Man.....
 
Any ideas...?
 
Thanks, and Cheers again....
 
Hervé
 
How's the Ocean in South of France (already warm...?)  

Hello,
to answer Aaron Lee post about DistoIma, here is how it works.
 
After calibration, get the focal length, distortion calculated by IM, lettin  
focal and disto as Constant or Variable, not fixed.
 
To use Distoima,  
 
Open a command prompt
type for example:
Distoima –v  -f 24 –k 24 –u 0.135 DSCN4929.JPG .\corrected\corr@.JPG
 
v means verbose
f is the focal length calculated by ImageModeler
k is the film back heigth
u is the distortion (u remove the disto, -d apply the distortion)
DSCN4929.JPG is the first image of the directory you want to correct
.\corrected\corr@.JPG are the corrected images
 
Just type Distoima to see all the options.
 
You can get the program in the freewares directory of the customer's support zone.
To access it, first register at http://www.realviz.com/register with your CID.
It will give you a login/password to access it.
 
regards

Hi,
 
  About Steff's post "calibration and residuals in pixels":
 
The residual color settings is only an indication, and unfortunatly its not proportionnal to the size of the input images (it shoud) :-((  
I would say the default settings are for 1Mp to 2Mp images.
In your case, having 2 pixels error as residuals is not bad ...
 
More than having "good" residuals, it is important to check the calibration by:
-  adding some new markers and check that the guiding lines passes through the right place in the other images ...(choose places in 3d that you didn't cover with the calibration markers)
- creating some "quick" primitives to check that the perspective and depth is ok in all the views. (ex: create quickly the body of your house with a cube and check that it fits in all the views).
 
Hope it helps,
 
Stef
 
PS: the ocean is not warm enough for me :-))

Hey thanks Stef,
 
Yes it would be cool to have it proportionnal to the images sizes..... As for creating quick primitives, that's a good trick...!
 
 
Thanks a lot....
 
Steff
 
PS . Is Stef a nickname for Stefan ??
 
 
2PS . What about a user Gallery in this forum... just reading text is a little boring, and it would be a good publicity for your apps....

I have a question though.... how does IM see the Locators, in other words, what kind of marks does a locator like.... I suppose sharp contrast, colors, form, .... a chart of what 's good, what's acceptable, and what's wrong would be nice to have....
 
I noticed that putting a loc at a very sharp corner did not help IM at all, also window corners are not good.... so I was wondering if you recommand more or less specila places to put locators..?
 
Cheers...
 
PS Doing curved banisters, as well as opening round windows in walls is very long, very boring and tedious.... I read in the 3.5 user manual that you removed the extrude alo,g a path.... WHY, was it not working..... coz I dont think the tools we have now are suited to build anything you want unless I am wrong, but who knows, execpt the little gallery (pretty cheap) on your site (with stuff done with older versions) one cannot really see the power of IM 3.5, too bad...!
 
Hervé

Ability to back import a model after making changes in a 3D app...... and still have an editabl model
 
als the normals in proportion with the poly sizes...... having lots of small polys in a place with normals turne on makes just a green pile of...... , you get the point.....
 
 
Possibility to subdivide geometry along just one axis......
 
Later

Hi Steff,
 
Back import a model from other 3D apps:
 
 They are actually 2 ways to do this with IM3.5:
1) Use OBJ format (red and exported by IM). We chose OBJ format as it is one of the most supported by 3D applications ...
2) Use 3ds plugin to export in IM nativ format (if you own 3ds Max...)
 
Which other import format you would like to see in IM ???
 
Stef

Hi,
 
About "good" calibration locators; the general rules are:
- cover your 3D scene (not all in the same plane)
- cover your image (not all centered, or not all in the left part of your image)
- be sure of the position of your locator (Avoid guessing positions !)
 
As we do not make "pattern matching" in IM, in opposite to MatchMover, the "contrast", "color" of the locator are not key points for good calibration (The patterns can be so different for a same locator if the viewpoint changes a lot).
 
Corners (sharp ones) are generally good points ...
 
We understood, that some points are not clear enough. So we keep working on tutorials, tips and tricks, that will be posted on the web site very soon.
 
Thanks for your help and feedback,
 
Stef

Hi Stef,
 
Thanks a lot for your clarifications.... in fact all of my Locators turn green after I enter a approx distortion value.... ditortion was set to "Known", so I turned it to "Constant" and I enter "0,135" (a number I found on the chat...), then I clicked on Calibrate and all Loc Turned green... with about 0,2 to 0,4 pix residual (pref was left as default...), so everything is good now about locators....
 
The doc was not to clear about what number you have to enter in the distortion field, and how to approximate this number, like also the film back (which is at default for now (24x36), so i'de like to know how do you know those numbers... Is the film back fine with a Sony 707 digi photo camera...? and what about the distortion value..... finally after computing, Image modeler returned 0,160 for the ditortion....
 
BTW, I noticed all that by myself, so I am not sure... I figured I was in need of those numbers, coz I used Ditoima afterwards to undistord the pictures.... (it works very good...!)
 
One last question is about the format you asked, yes LW import would be killer as well as officialy supporting the export for LW7,5, though the export via LW 6,0 looks like it working.... but before all we need an editable LW import in Image Modeler (in other words,  I want to be able to select and move points of an object after importing in Image Modeler, for now any import I do is reduced to his own bounding box edits..)
 
a super last one.... cameras returned a focal ranging from 36,501mm to 36,702mm, but when I exported my scene to LWS, and after checking the virtual cam in LW focal lentgh, it is set to 21mm..... normal.... ?? is it a conversion from real focal lens to LW focal lens  ??
 
...... " et parce que la vie est injuste, un dernier super hyper banco, apparement la question qui tue.... : "What happened to the Marius Bevel, Jos Mirror and Jackson Bevel (along a path)   ???"
 
 
Cheers Stef
Steff

Hello,
 
About distortion:
 
  A good thing to do, if you use always the same camera is to estimate its distortion (at zoom out).
Create a special project for this : take 3 or 4 shots (constant zoom) of some grids placed in 2 or 3 perpendicular planes. Calibrate this project  and let IM estimate the distortion (select constant, as you took constant zoom photos).
 
The grids give you good calibration points (good distribution in 2D, in 3D) and easy to identify.
 
Once estimated, you can use this value for your further projects (select known distortion).
 
Hope it helps,
 
Stef

OK cool I did it, Basically people with the Sony DSC-707 should go for "0,210" for the distortion.
 
Thanks Stef for the tip, that's true, with cross type markers aka grids, one can really calibrate very well.... residual varies from 0,02 to 0,00..... really precise !!
 
Maybe you know about this too....
 
cameras returned a focal ranging from 36,501mm to 36,702mm, but when I exported my scene to Lightwave, and after checking the virtual cam in LW focal lentgh, it is set to 21mm..... normal.... ?? is it a conversion from real focal lens to LW focal lens ??
 
Thanks  
later
Hervé

Hello Stef,
 
I noticed an important function that would take some pain out of the work. Deleting a locator from a single view only would be a nice function. The only alternative is to delete that locator from all views at once.
 
Also, is there any way to recreate IM Image Planes in Maya?
As I read above that you beleive that the output to Maya does not contain the camera distortion information. But what about using this distoima.exe in a work around?
Any sugestions?

Hello,
 
  I think the function already exists : "backspace"  erases only the selected marker in the active viewport (shot).
 
Image planes in Maya: i saw it work, but could not explain how to do it - Anyone here ?
Using distoima should be a good solution to replace the images in Maya: you would get a better fit of the locator and objects in Maya...
 
Stef

I have another suggestion.
 
When zoomed in, due to the framing of the Image Plane in a window. It is impossible to pan over to the very outer edges of the Image Plane once it has been successfully calculated. So my suggestion is as follows:
 
1) An interactive ability to temporarily display any Image Plane/Camera as 'unsolved' (I mean as though it was not distortion corrected)
 
or what may be a simpler solution...
 
2) Simply increase the default framing of the Image Planes in all the windows so that you can pan to the very edge while zoomed.
 
Other than this and my want to recreate ImageModeler's Image Planes in Maya( So that I could utilize Maya's far superior modeling tools), I can't think of anything else at the moment.
 
-Thanks

but, when do you think another version I planned ?? using Distoima kind of solves a bit, but I am in LW.....

as pointed out before in this thread, undistorted backplate extraction would be *very* useful!
another useful addition (which maybe is easy to integrate?) would be to be able to draw snappable guide lines (like in photoshop, but also as diagonals) on the images. sometimes, in lower resolution fotos, locating the edge of an object is quite difficult. another case is when building edges are hidden by a tree. if you could draw two intersecting guid lines you could set a marker at the right point with much more ease. in both cases it would speed up the marker setting process.
on the mac side, an direct import/export (with UV textures) to the electric image universe FACT format and the maxon C4D format would be very helpful, too! as far as we know, both apps are quite popular among architectural viz studios!
 
best regards
 
markus groeteke
3dworks visual computing

as pointed out before in this thread, undistorted backplate extraction would be *very* useful!
another useful addition (which maybe is easy to integrate?) would be to be able to draw snappable guide lines (like in photoshop, but also as diagonals) on the images. sometimes, in lower resolution fotos, locating the edge of an object is quite difficult. another case is when building edges are hidden by a tree. if you could draw two intersecting guid lines you could set a marker at the right point with much more ease. in both cases it would speed up the marker setting process.
on the mac side, an direct import/export (with UV textures) to the electric image universe FACT format and the maxon C4D format would be very helpful, too! as far as we know, both apps are quite popular among architectural viz studios!
 
best regards
 
markus groeteke
3dworks visual computing

Hi'
 
I'm quite new on IM, but I've some requirements for the future version:
 
-a stupid one: the activation of the short cut 'apple'+H for hiding IM in MacOS X
-a better 3D modeler, I know that an Autocad Edition was just released, but Autocad is not cheap... I need only some basic 3D stuff like there're in Maya, polygons would be fine.
-a simpler way to move/translate/rotate in 3D or 2D mode, by example using a three buttons mouse like for the VRML viewer or OpenInventor, or SolidWorks or Catia (not Autocad's one please).
-a typical value for the quality thresholds with other amout of pixels. 1, 2, 3 ,4, 5 or 6M would be fine in the manual.
 
edit: if you could put a beautiful trihedron in the package for the calibration of the distortion lens it would be nice. because i'm trying to do it with square made of paper but the precision is to low-> i've obtained residual between 0.1 and 0.8 with a 5M camera, not enough for an exact calibration.
Or you can post a table with the distorsion lens of the most common camera, based of the feedback of the users in this forum?
 
edit 2: oki i've just understanding where the calculate distortion lens was, in the property tab of each photo (it's written nowhere in the manual)
so I understund why my recedent project were quite wrong, simply because the default option of th distortion lens is: Known = 0.000<-please put this value to constant by default!!
another thing with the distortion lens is that distorion lens depends not only of your camera and your focal length but also of you aperture!! so you have to fix your aperture and not to zoom when you're taking your shoots! you could write this in the manual.
 
By example, for the nikon coolpix 5700, the distortion lens at 35mm is approximatively: 0.231 at f-2.8, 0.131 at f-5.0 and 0.344 at f-8.0<-not really constant...
 
crash of IM: when you delete a texture (*.png) on your hard disk and then you open the project, IM ask you where is the missing texture (normal), but if you answer Cancel, IM crashs each time! on MacOS 10.2.6.
 
 
that's all for now

Hello, What do you mean by  

 
???????
 
Cheers, later Hervé

 
???????
 
Cheers, later Hervé
 
I meant that actually persons who are using IM use Maya and the obj format for 3D modelling. With the autocad edition you can do the same with autocad and the dxf format. that means that if you want to really use your software, you should almost buy another software for 3D modeling. and buying maya or autocad just for doing basic 3D modeling is a pity, isn't it?
 
in my opinion, you could raise the price of IM, and add a good 3D modeler.

Actually, the modeler in IM is crap... so replace it with a good one (Contact Brad Peebler from Luxology and buy its MODO stuff... ha ha ha...
 
I am using LW with IM, but I never model in LW in order to import it in IM...( I could, I have an export to OBJ), but then the object newly imported in IM is not editable (its vertices or points or edges, I mean), so that sucks....
 
Later

Also a small widow with some statistics about how many faces or vertices or edges are selected.. and also just to know if some points were glued together ... normal statistics...
 
in my last posts I must have been angry that day... hummm oh yeah the canitair....grrr
 
Cheers, Hervé

Something to change right away is the glue vertices.... it allows you to glue just 2 vertices at the time.... incredible... and without any statistcs panel, how do you do then....; very weird... you dont know how many vertices are selected.... well that maybe why I can only glue 2 at the time... please fix that !!
 
Hervé

hello today's my birthday...... jeeez 44... well... so you have to satisfy this.... he he he
 
OK, the request would be the possibility to orient (rotate -90° or +90°) the photographs in IM, modeling like this sometimes makes me tired (eyes), because inevitably, you keep rotate your head ......  
 
Note: you can always take your pictures in another way, but then you lose a good deal of your subject....
 
It should be pretty easy to implement such possibility, like a small requester or a pop-up when loading the pictures....
 
to illustrate what I mean, see the tut from realviz (statue).....
 
that would be a + , definitly....!!
 
Cheers

Also adding NURBS would be a real plus.... for curved objects.... ( abit like PhotoModeler)
 
Cheers... Later, Hervé

You could definitly put back the mirror tool.... I was watching the DV Garage video, they pay big attention not to have anything to duplicate that would need a Mirror tool .... for let's say the roof, he duplicated it, then rotated it on the other side.... now I understand this would go for a simple doll's house, but real life is somehow different.... and roofs are much more complicated....
 
So please put back the mirror Tool, Or could you at least explain why U removed it from earlier versions ??
 
Loads of people on this forum by the way....
 
Hervé
I feel I talk alone in the desert.... summer time is over, let's get back to work...

After many years of using IM, the types of projects I have been involved with become more and more complex which requires more and more from the software.
 
Yes, we can all model a box, a VCR, etc but in real world projects I have to model streets, roads, buildings all from real world constraints of space,traffic,people narrow streets.  Everything has to taken as pano's manually and stitched together - then IM can begin.
 
I have looked at Spheron VR cameras and they produce excellent automated 360 x 180 panos but not in CubicVR format.  IM really has to incorporate new technologies such as full panos and calibrate as accurately as with single shots.