Why an reconstructed object saved as .obj file looks different when loaded again?

[Victor Ramamoorthy]

I don't know if this is due to lighting and missing presets. There is also caption that says that data loaded is unstructured. Why is this? Thanks.

[cam3d]

Hi Victor,

You're right about lighting - It could be the difference between shaded and shadeless rendering. - Another possibility is that you exported the wrong model - If you have multiple meshes, make sure you've selected the correct one to export in the export dialogue box!

Re: Structured vs unstructured:

'An object (photogrammetric clouds or scans) can be named "structured" when it includes the origin's point of its element" - https://www.3dflow.net/zephyr-doc/en/FAQs.html - Though someone could probably expand on this a little bit more - Not sure exactly what that means

[Victor Ramamoorthy]

Thanks cam3D. Perhaps the origin is not defined in .obj files. Or the system is expecting a .ply file with origin specified. I am just guessing.

[Andrea Alessi]

Hi Victor,

unstructured means that there are no camera informations tied to that object. This tells me that you opened an obj, or something else, in zephyr. Which is fine zephyr can be used as a viewer too.

However, in the zep files, there are camera information that zephyr needs in order to generate elements (clouds, meshes). If you just open a mesh , or point cloud, that is unstructured by nature. An obj or fbx is not a zep project.

So i assume what you did was exporting something from zephyr, then opening it. You may be seeing differently , because lighting may have been off when generating, and on when importing it in a new workspace. Simply click the lightbulb icon to toggle lights in zephyr.

[Victor Ramamoorthy]

Yes, that is exactly what I did. I saved an .obj file and closed zephyr. Then I opened zephyr at a later point and loaded the ,obj file. It looked completely different without lighting. I clicked the light bulb several times, but did not help. Then to light up, I added color to each vertex, but it screwed up the display of object. Perhaps this is due to retopology using hexagonal meshes or something like that.

[Andrea Alessi]

Can you share some screenshot and possibly some details on what you did with the exported obj? thanks!

[jumpjack]

I noticed, instead, that multiple textures from multiple sources images are applied to same part of the mesh; the resulting .obj file confuses other 3d softwares.

[Andrea Alessi]

Hi Jumpjack,

sorry for the late reply. For some reason vbulletin flagged your post for review and i didn't notice it until today.

If I understand correctly, you are having issues loading certain models in certain software. Make sure that the target software supports multi-texturing. If not, unfortunately you'll have to force texture generation to 1 texture only. If I didn't understand correctly your question, please elaborate a bit!