Memento / RecapPhoto differences

[Anonymous]

I have been working with both Memento and RecapPhoto projects recently. First of all, these two emerging technologies are quite impressive.  There will be many uses for this going foward.  Nice job on what you have made so far.

It would be helpful to understand the differences between the two offerings what the overall intended use is for each product.  From the couple of projects done so far it seems that the same processing engine supports both.  It looks like using Memento is similar to using Recap Ultra (highest quality mesh).  Can you confirm that?   When I log into Recap360, I see my Momento projects.

Additionaly, our intended use is for large sites such as a building site or roadway area to develop a ground model & basemap.   To do this we would need to introduce our ground control points to properly scale and orient the rendered data in 3D.   How do you accomplish that in Memento, or what else would you suggest to do this?

Keep up the great work!

Greg

[vidanom]

Hi Greg,

Thank you for your input!

Yes, both Memento & ReCap 360 are using the same algorithms. While the intention might be to bring these two together, at the moment the biggest difference is that with ReCap 360 you can add survey points (coordinates) to the images, so they appear at exact position in space (process explained in this short video), and Memento which is a desktop product where you can work with these high detailed mesh models, run diff analysis or prepare them for 3D printing.

Mitko

[TatjanaDzambazova]

Hi Greg,

to add a bit more detail of what Mitko started explaining.

in Autodesk, we have one photo-to-3D engine, and we use the same engine behnd different products (123D Catch which is consumer grade and limited in quality, Photo on reCap360 and Memento).

The difference between Photo and Memento today are the followng:

- Photo on reCap360 is photo to 3d mesh service, full stop. You upload photos and get a high quality raw 3D mesh geometry  generated by the photo to 3d cloud service that you can export as is (or just roughly cut by a cut plane) to different formats the automatically generated mesh. The mesh creation is great quality, but there are no further edit fix or prep tools. If that is good enough for you and you dont need any further edits to the mesh, reCap would be good enough for you.

- Memento goes beyond that - it uses the same cloud service behind the scene to create the same high qiality 3D mesh, but then it has a toolset to clean up precisely the surrounding however needed, find visible and invisible errors on the mesh ( holes, spikes, particles, tunnels(, has tools to fix them automatically or manually (mesh diagnostic or the manual tools such as hole fill, bridge, ), can measure, scale and compare meshes, can do basic scultping where fix is needed and extrude to create a full volume when needed, calcultes surface, volume, has a 3D print toolset, has tools to retopologize and decimate the mesh and most importantly a variety of ways to prepare the clean fixed mesh for various downstream uses.

Meshes generated from reality, especially when one needs them to be really high quality, can be as huge as multibillion polygons, size that can be barely read in majority of CAD or modeling packages. Memento is built on a state of art mesh streaming engine that can handle billions of polygon big meshes and work smooth with them

But to use those meshes in CAD apps, apps like 3dsMax, Maya, Mudbox, vo VR and AR or publishing on the cloud etc one needs to decimate (reduce the size of the mesh which if not done right, can reduce the beauty or quality of the model. Thus we created bunch of very good export tools that help, when reducing the size of the model (decimation) to alos preserve the geometry as best as possible, or preserve the texture to be beautiful by baking in the vairous texture maps on the model, so they look even when reduced to small size still really good and not like origami 🙂

FInally, in Memento we are able to create quite good quality of turntables and keyframe videos and high res PNG imagery, needed for presentational purposes.

As you can see, Memento aims to cover the full workflow from reality capture (currently photo and ARtec but more types of capture to come) to final clean and fixed high quality mesh that can be used for many downstream digital usages, publishing for AR VR Web or prep for 3D printing - all in one app and with most important goal to make it really easy, intuitive and fun to use. We are still in early stages but we beliebe that we are on the right track

we will continue beefing up all the mentioned tools, be it FIX (geometry and texture), EDIT (better sculptiong, shelling etc) and even stronger support for smart export.

tanja

[KPerison]

Tanja,

Like the original poster I am interested in the workflows for larger scale operations like site developments, roads, volume calculations, etc. as I am also beginning to use UAV's to capture the site photos.  Is it the corrrect workflow to use Recap360 to enter the know coordinates of several points on several pictures, generate the mesh in Recap? Then open the .rcm file in Memento to do any further edits and processing?  Is the integrity of coordinates for the mesh still intact after post editing in Memento?

What are the next steps in order to get the mesh imported into Civil3D in order to create a Civil3D surface for use in volumes/profiles/sections? 

What happens if there are overhangs in the mesh? How does Civil3D handle that as TINN surfaces can't handle overhangs?

A webcast on this topic would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks.

[vidanom]

Hi,

You can use your proposed workflow, especially until we don't have option to add known coordinates in Memento.

While editing the mesh in Memento all the coordinates are getting intact, unless you scale the object.

To bring it in Civil 3D you can export it as RCP file, and import that.

Then you can easily create surface from the points in Civil3D.

This is one example article of converting points into surface by using Civil3D.

Best,

Mitko

[Anonymous]

Hi Mitko.

I am new in this topic and I have spent many hours in trying to undestand how to work with the photo-to-3D engine with ReCap, but until now I don't undestand.

I have used the ReCap 360 Online (recap360.autodesk.com) to generate the mesh of the pictures, but there I can't modified the 3D model. Then I installed the desktop version (ReCap 360 Ultimate), but there is no way to do the photo-to-3D process. I am a bit confusse with this.

I want to do what is in this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0hCCX5T8Fc

Can you please guide me to choose the right way to acomplish this?.

Many thanks.

Regards.

Enrique

[TatjanaDzambazova]

Hi Enrique, regardless if you created the mesh model from photos (in Recap Photo or in Memento), if you want to edit the MESH you have to use Memento. reCap is a pointcloud engine and does not offer mesh editing. the value proposition of memento is exactly in being able to visualize, edit and prepare for downstream use meshes that are huge, with the ability to clean up, fix, edit, change, retopo, decimate, 3dprint, publish or export to many file formats. if you want to then use the edited and changed mesh in ReCap, you will have to export it back to pointcloud format using RCS export in Memento.

hope this clarifies things

t

[Anonymous]

I have done that, thrue memento open the project from my cloud account and
then export it in rcp file. After that I have been able to open it in the
desktop ReCap 360 Ultimate. Here I can erase the mesh, establish quotation
marks, etc.
So what your tellin me is that the *desktop ReCap 360 Ultimate* can be used
only with files comming from scaners??, There's no way to use it with the
photo to 3D service?.

Thanks!

[TatjanaDzambazova]

ReCap the Desktop tool is pointcloud engine. You can do all operations you want on point clouds ( point clouds can come from Laser scanners or photomeshes that have been converted to point clouds) and prepare for further workflows with pointcloud data. It does not have ability to edit/change/prep meshes. (when you say you exported from Memento to RCP and used it in ReCap to 'erase' the mes, you are not erasing or working with a mesh, but with the pointcloud of the mesh). i hope this is clear.

Memento on the other hand, doesnt do pointclouds, it is a mesh creation and editing engine that can export to pointcloud format for further use in reCap (after cleanup fix or optimization) 

so, depending on what exactly is your desired workflow, you can use one or both in combination.we will have a combined offering of reCap and memento once Memento goes commercial.

t