Drive around the block with Recap

[Anonymous]

Hello!

So I have a few things I want to bring up.  

Cons:

1: I spent 2 hours running registration on 10 scans positions.  Twice.  After I select and match scans I go into indexing.  Once the project opens after that I am left with a huge mess of unregistered scan data.  Very discouring not being able to go back to figure out why the scans are not registered anymore.

2:  Was not able to choose a wall or flate surface and say this is +z axis for any sort of alignment.

3. I get every scale in the universe except Centimeters.  I use Maya so the defaults of rendering is centimeters.  I don't want anything else but centimeters.  I should never have to scale my data anywhere.  The pipeline would start with Recap and it needs to come exported out of Recap correctly.

4. I want to know how many millions of points I have in the scene.  A display hud option for point could total points for project would be really handy.

5.  Need XYZ export of Pointcloud so I can bring it into Maya right away.  Partio IO support would be great.  It's already written. http://www.disneyanimation.com/technology/partio.html

6. Need subsample exports of pointcloud data for export.  I don't ever want to have a 11 gig export of point cloud.  I might want to use a 4:1 subsample of points to preview inside of Maya for previs, or I might want a 1:1 or even 2:1 export of points to mesh as geo.

7. Registration is extremely slow in recap.  I would rather use sphere targets than sit in recap waiting for each and every scan to line up.  Please add sphere target registration and checkard cards that will auto detect.  I can register in Faro Scene 20 scans in less than 5 minutes.  It takes hours inside of Recap.   Placing sphere targets In real life gets easier the more you do it.  Would be nice to support non spherical pointcloud scans.  If I have multiple pointcloud solves from Agisoft, I would love to bring them into Recap and try to register the data.

8.  When selecting registration points its almost impossible to see what you are choosing when you have a Faro Focus 3D scanner that has autoexposure blowing out the color data.  Please have a toggle to look at infared data only and ignore the color image if needed.  Lets face it.  The Faro has a horrible camera and there are no options to turn autoexposure or autowhitebalance off.

9. The online published install of Recap Pro is missing files.  People can't even get the software to install correctly.  A huge turn off for anyone looking to try the software out. Someone should be fired over this.  🙂

10: What might work for auto registration without selecting anything would be to perhaps solve multiple positions for pairs of scans.  Then let the user choose one of 10 solves that looks like the best fit.  That way you could let the computer process for a day and come back with minimal time spent in front of a computer.

11: It would be nice if you could add a timeline for frame scrubbing so I could merge animated pointcloud files together and export them as a single PRT sequence out of the application.  It would allow for a lot of really neat possiblities and pave the way for the future. 

Pros:

1:The performance of data is astounding in Recap. 

2: Love the set orgin function.  If only I could get everything registered.  

Without solutions for all the above, I don't think I could consider using Recap as the savior pointcloud application.  

I'm attaching an image of my progress.

Thanks!

-Scott