Road to version 3.5!

[Roberto]

Update: beta is now rolling out. Want to join? Write us at support@3dflow.net with a brief description of what would be your use of Zephyr (or post below) and we'll add you to the beta testing group!


We are glad to announce that the version 3.5 of Zephyr will be coming in October *!
And v.3.4? Well, version 3.5 will be a major upgrade coming from a independent developed branch and it deserved a proper version number
I opened this post to unveil some of new features in preview.

First of all, there will be a major update of the technology. As you know we improve technology with every update and we are glad to continue to invest on technology first. Both Samantha and Stasia are being improved a lot and we introduced novel and better algorithms to solve the structure and motion problems. But there are other countless improvements and new features awaiting you. We will post them here in the next weeks, keep reading

* can't wait till October? No worries! An open beta will be certainly made available before October

[Andrea Alessi]

Did anybody mention "better frame extraction from videos"?

Work in progress!

[jonasz]

Super!
When wil the beta be released? Please inform me after it can be used. Thx!

[Roberto]

Super!
When wil the beta be released? Please inform me after it can be used. Thx!

The ETA for the beta is mid-September. When it's ready, we'll notify everyone through our newsletter: https://www.3dflow.net/3df-zephyr-newsletter/

[Filippo]

New shaders are looking good

Now Zephyr has new default shaders for both stereo meshes and textured meshes.



Default shaders are customizable with the usual button set in the rendering menu (e.g. enable/disable lights or use uniform colorization), and there are additional options in the rendering options tab, under 'Shading' (more coming in the future).



On top of this, full freedom is given to the users via custom shaders.
Custom shaders are written by users to customize the way Zephyr renders meshes. They are reloaded at runtime upon modification, and parameters are automatically exposed in the UI to play with.

Here's a toy example:

[Roberto]

Let's speak about the Samantha improvements. During the last month we concentrated on improving the geometrical reconstruction phase of the Structure from Motion. We changed many things, with accuracy and robustness always as first target in mind. Additionally we optimized some other parts. The final result is a much more robust pipeline, that is also a bit faster.

Here's an example of before / after results.
This is the dataset of Piazza dei Signori, a small and nice square in the downtown of Verona. The dataset is particularly challenging for Samantha as it contains many pictures with steep angles and different zoom.
The results with version 3.302 were correct, but many cameras were not oriented with close range presets.

Close range - default v 3.302:

Close range - deep v. 3.302:

Development version Close range - Default:

Almost all the cameras are now oriented with the default preset! Additonally, we got a 30% speedup and many more final 3D points!

This is just one of the many improvements that awaits you in the next version, more details will be unveiled in the next days.

[Filippo]

Improved unicode support

We had minimal support for unicode since version 2, but it was quite limited and far from complete.

As Zephyr gains popularity also in the eastern world (particularly China and Japan), we received a lot of feedback on the matter and we worked hard to give a more proper support.

As of now, Zephyr handles unicode file systems quite well and we are working to enable unicode names for workspace objects, control points, etc..



This is the kind of under-the-hood change that required a lot of effort throughout our whole codebase and will be transparent to most users... but it's worth the trouble!

[Roberto]

Texture Improvements

Also the texturing engine has been improved a lot. Additionally, we know fully support 16bit and even 32bit texture generation:


We made several tuning and improvements to the texture generation algorithm, making it more robust to variation of illumination and reducing the artifacts:

Before:


After:

[Andrea Alessi]

CAD drawing

It is already possible to draw polylines (which can be exported in vector form) in Zephyr. This requires the user to draw their element in two images that see the same element, such as a window frame, a wall profile, or anything else. This is cool because you just need a sparse point cloud, but can be quite time consuming and ultimately, the accuracy also depends on the user's accuracy when placing points in both images.

We went one step further in Zephyr 3.5. You can now draw polylines with the same easy to use interface, and by simply drawing the elements in one picture. This is possible because the drawing element will be then drawn on the existing dense point cloud (hint: you can also import laser scan point clouds and apply this process to them too ) so, while some of the accuracy is still depending on the user.

So, simply zoom in and select your points



Click "Ok" when done and presto, you're ready to go! You can also group them in layers for easier management.



Here is how our toy example looks like

[3Dflow]

We are currently preparing to roll out the newest beta.

Write us at info@3dflow.net - or post below - with a brief description of what would be your use of Zephyr and we'll add you to the beta testing group!

[Andrea Alessi]

v.3455 changelog

• Structure from Motion improvements
• Texturing improvements
• New shader system with custom shader editor for mesh and textured meshes
• Multiview stero significant improvements
• Initial Hyperplane matching implementation (experimental and disabled by default, many updates will follow before final release)
• Improved frames extraction from video
• Manual orient single camera from 3 control points
• Added kmz - LOD export
• Full Unicode support (also file loading and object names)
• CAD drawing from a single image
• Added drawing elements layers
• Added drawing elements import from txt
• Revit integration plugin
• Texture can now be generated and exported in 16bit (exr) or 32bit (tiff)
• Autopath creation from all cameras in animation
• Can now disable coloring to speed up processing
• Can now use unified and persistent cache folder
• Tons of fixes
• Tons of new bugs
• Much more!

[Andrea Alessi]

Last week at Intergeo, Dennis suggested we added video recording in 4K.

Did we? Of course we did ! Thank you Dennis for your feedback

[Andrea Alessi]

Rolling out beta v.3459 in the next hour or so

v.3459 changelog

+ Added 4k video export support
+ Better memory management when loading image of very big size ( >50 Megapixels)
+ Fixed a problem with synthetic bubble views
+ MVS Final voting phase speeded up
+ Improved dense point cloud post processing and coloring
+ Activated hyperplane matching on high details settings by default (still experimental)
+ Fixed kmz export problem

[Andrea Alessi]

v.3.463

+ Improved hyperplane matching, stereo and surface extraction algorithms
+ Fixed a crash during surface extraction
+ Improved / Fixed problems with kmz export
+ Improved polyline extraction from single images workflow
+ Improved revit plugin
+ Miscellaneous fixes
+ Improved 4k UI support