Starting a DIY Project - The Visual Way

I am a very visual person. If you tell me I should paint my wall blue, I won’t agree to disagree until I’ve photoshopped a picture of the entire room with that wall blue.

So, what do I do when I want to add built-in cabinets or book shelves? I can’t just photoshop some cabinets on the wall, I need to model, texture and walk through the entire room before deciding on anything. Let me introduce you to my favorite method: Photogrammetry.

From Scan to model I add add custom made cabinets, lighting and countertops in.

Final product! I may change the color of the walls after all but I couldn’t be more happy with the additional storage space and awesome zoom background my office now offers

Photogrammetry

This method can be used for more than just renovating a room, it’s often used for land surveying, exterior renovations, landscape quoting, square footage calculations (floor, wall ceiling and landscape) and more! I primarily use this technology for interior scanning and exterior landscape scanning.

The method is quite easy, First start with cleaning the room you’re going to scan. I like to remove objects that have reflections like picture frames. Turn the lights on in the rooms and open the shades, you want the room brightly and evenly lighted.

Follow this diagram to take photos of objects and rooms

Grab your camera, phone, drone, anything with a camera sensor and storage for a lot of photos. Since we’ll be taking a ton of photos make sure its shooting in JPEG/JPG or PNG and NOT RAW. Begin taking overlapping photos of the room or landscape at different angles, levels and orientations (just make sure to not twist the camera, you want everything shot in a single orientation). Make sure to get photos of the ceiling, floor, walls, decor, light fixtures, etc. from every angle. For my office I took approximately 300 photos on my SONY A6300 camera. For the exterior of my house I took still images from a 10 minute long drone video circling my house which ended up being 7,000 photos at 40MP.

Choose your software, I Personally use Metashape which requires a powerful desktop with at least 32Gb of RAM. There are online solutions for photogrammetry but they tend to be more expensive. If you do not have access to a desktop, I have heard great things about LumaLabs however I am not able to speak from experience.

Software

Time to take all of those photos and turn them into a 3D Object!

Open Metashape
Click on the Workflow tab in the toolbar. Within the Workflow tools click Add Photos and import all of the photos you have for this project.
In the same Workflow tab click Align Photos
- Metashape’s default settings are pretty good and produce some awesome models without any tweaking; feel free to play round with these settings though!
- Once Photos are aligned you’ll see a colored sparse point cloud in the viewer
Lets jump back into the Workflow tab and click dense point cloud
- This process can take hours so be patient and let your computer do the work. Once it’s done you’ve got a dense point cloud to see in the viewer. This isn’t your model yet since these are just floating vertices.
- Pick the quality of the model. I find high is more than enough for most projects
Last Step! In the Workflow tab click Build Mesh
- you can use the default values but make sure to base the mesh off the dense point cloud.
- Once the mesh has been generated you’re done! You can export this mesh as a number of file types

You did it!

Time to take that beautiful model and import it into your favorite 3D modeling software. I personally enjoy using Cinema 4D for realistic rendering and texturing and SolidWorks for creating dimensionally accurate cabinets and cut sheets for the plywood.