Photogrammetry - Couchez windmill

This is a windmill in my neighbourhood. 393 pictures taken with Mavic Pro 2, processed in Reality Capture. 32.2M faces, scaled down to 300K for web view and reconstruction.

https://krpano.kri-soft.be/photogrammetry/couchezmolen/

Aaaah, so many questions - I love it

I don't know if it is necassary, but I would rather have too many than too little pictures. I guess it depends on the leve of detail you want for the final model - both on the geometry side and the texture side. From what I see in other user groups, 300 pictures is not really a lot and some projects are in the thousands of pictures.

The processing of the data is pretty fast. My process is as follows:
Lightroom (~30 minutes)
- copy the pictures to the local hard drive
- filter images (out of focus, or subject not visible, ...)
- correct some lighting, mostly lowering or raising exposure (images are in DNG so we have some room to correct)
- export the pictures for usage in Reality Capture

Reality Capture (~60minutes)
- import the pictures
- align images
- set bounding box and ground level
- build a preview model
- add some control points in case some images could not be aligned or if the model shows some inconsistent areas
- align images again
- build a high detail model
- unwrap and texture the model
- simplify the model for web usage (krpano)

If needed, I also make corrections to the exported model in Blender and re-import in Reality Capture to retexture. Corrections take up the most amount of work as it is all manual work.

Then the krpano work starts

Taking the images for this model was about 60 minutes (drained 3 batteries).