And for those interested in doing this on mobile in real-time, we've just released a beta SDK (https://abound.dev) that lets you add real-time photogrammetry to any iOS app.
And OpenSFM https://github.com/mapillary/OpenSfM
I wish they better documented their specific benefits and short comings.
What aspects of these make them great alternatives in your opinion?
* COLMAP and Meshroom are able to create a mesh from the pointcloud whereas VisualSFM is not. If you wish to create a mesh out of VisualSFM end result, you could use OpenMVS[1]
* COLMAP does not create a texture file for the resulting mesh - instead it uses vertex color for "texturing"
* COLMAP and Meshroom licenses permit commercial usage - VisualSFM does not (you need to license it)
From these three I've found that COLMAP works the best and VisualSFM comes second. Meshroom has a nice feature that allows you to add images into your model incrementally (I think without complete recompute) but it didn't work that well yet.
What comes to open source photogrammetry in general, my opinion is that COLMAP + OpenMVS or OpenMVG[2] + OpenMVS are the tools to go albeit the command line interface with huge amount of possible options can be a bit tricky at first.
One startup taking that approach is https://standardcyborg.com. Apologies if linking to a business is unseemly - they are YC-backed at least.
I have to wonder how AMD is letting NVIDIA win so big in academia, when their GPUs are actually quite competitive. I'm beginning to think that they have some management practice or culture which makes it difficult for them to retain software talent, otherwise I can't really understand how they always seem to have a glaring weakness somewhere that they're not addressing.
[0]: https://github.com/alicevision/AliceVision/blob/develop/INST...
As much as I hate it I've been vendor locked to NV for years and as a result I don't really care anymore. I'll never buy a AMD card because I need to get work done and get paid. It sucks, but not enough for me to go through the pain of trying to work with the far far inferior OpenCL based software for rendering/photogrammetry etc. I don't even touch ML, but I assume the story is the same there.
What's the value proposition for writing software that works with OpenCL when your entire market already has NV cards? The price differential is tiny too, maybe if AMD came down like 30% for the equivalent computational power.
During all the time, AMD did essentially nothing. (They weren't financially in the position to do so.) Then they missed the AI boom.
Now they are trying, right at the time where the compute specific performance lead that they once had is gone and when their perf/W is terrible (which is not a good thing for datacenters.)
There is really no mystery here.
However, stones and plant bulbs came out great.
Edit: After some of the other links in this discussion, I definitely need to revisit this project! Some people have had great success with foliage and flowers it seems like.
For closed objects though the results are probably better than I've found in commercial software.
That's always the case in vfx. The best source is contemporaneous interviews directly with the people involved, which is sporadic and very rare. Most demo reels, even for big software packages, are incredibly misleading. Company A might have some partnership with a production studio, slap their name in the credits, use their work in the demo reel, but the output is junk so the artist scraps it and does it the "old fashioned way" from scratch. Or the software gets used in a very specific, tangential way like roughing something out or converting file formats back and forth.
VFX companies and software packages are trying to sell themselves for future work. So they tend to gloss over details and present themselves much better than they are in practice. After a show wraps, it's really difficult to get good information. The files on disk may not even open anymore and the artists have moved on.
