News

30.07.2016: Website is back online

The website has been down the past few days, but now it is back online!

I upgraded the server to a new distribution release, and some of the services did not work anymore. Due to limited spare time, it took me a couple of days to sort out everything. These were the main problems:

• The apache webserver was upgraded to 2.4. This version requires a new format in the access control definition. The old one would be supported, but only if mod_access_compat is enabled. This wasn't in my case, so the website was not accessible anymore.
• After I sorted that out, I found out that the php module mysqli was not supported anymore, so I changed this to mysql (php access to MySQL DB server).
• This however did not help much as the PDO module for MySQL was not installed, so I installed this as well.

I hope now everything runs smooth now!

Concerning a new release of Regard3D: I have many ideas for a new version, also new versions of third-party libraries (OpenMVG 1.0, for example) and tools (mvs-texturing with tone-mapping) are waiting to be included. Unfortunately my private and professional life do not allow me to work much on Regard3D. But I intend to work on a new version of Regard3D in the next few months!

30.06.2015: Version 0.8.0 is released

Regard3D 0.8.0 has been released! Please find it under the links provided in the Download page.

Changelog:

• Upgraded to OpenMVG 0.8.1
• Changed multithreading in compute matches step

With this new version, Regard3D uses the new OpenMVG 0.8.1 chain. To the user, the most notable change is that the global SfM pipeline now also accepts picture sets with more than one focal length. Internally, triangulation results are now stored in a (binary) JSON file created with the Cereal library.

Regard3D 0.8.0 can read and work with projects created with previous versions of Regard3D. However, projects created with Regard3D 0.8.0 can't be read with previous versions  of Regard3D.

The changed multithreading in the compute step improves the speed of this step for large images. For small to medium sized images, the speed should be about the same.

15.10.2015: Version 0.9.0 is released

Regard3D 0.9.0 has been released! Please find it under the links provided in the Download page.

Changelog:

• Upgraded to OpenMVG 0.9.0
• Third-party programs (MVE, PoissonRecon) up to date
• Mac: OpenMP-enabled build

Most notably, the OpenMVG library has been updated to 0.9.0, and the MVE-toolchain is also up-to-date. The MVE tools are faster than before and require less memory, and they are based on a new file format (MVE2).

The Mac version has been built with the OpenMP-enabled Clang (https://clang-omp.github.io/), including most third-party tools. This means that also on the Mac Regard3D is now very fast! The surface generation with PoissonRecon is still single-threaded, however, the version built with OpenMP-Clang was not stable.

Known issues:

• Triangulations created with a version before Regard3D 0.8.0 can still be loaded, but not used for densifications. Please create new triangulations.
• With some scenes it can happen that the incremental chain fails, if the selected image pair is too close. Please select another pair in this case.
• With some scenes, the new version of texrecon (the texture mapping program) shows worse results than the previous version. The dynamic of the colors is much worse than on the original pictures. This issue has been reported to the original author. If "Global seam leveling" is switched off, the results may be better.

12.05.2015: Version 0.7.1 is released

Regard3D 0.7.1 has been released! Please find it under the links provided in the Download page.

Changelog:

• Fixed bug when using CMVS: When creating a dense pointcloud and selecting CMVS/PMVS and using visibility information, there was an error because of a wrong path.
• Improved speed of Windows version, especially in file handling (workaround of a MinGW-w64/win32-api problem, see description here)
• Added multithreading in computing matches on Mac OS X, see below
• Surfaces with textures (OBJ file format) are now loaded with AssImp, see below
• "Export to CMPMVS" renamed to "Export to external MVS", MeshRecon format added (see here)

Multithreading on Mac OS X

Most of the multithreading in OpenMVG is done with OpenMP. Unfortunately, the Apple Clang compiler (which is part of Xcode) does not support OpenMP. There is a fork of Clang which supports OpenMP (see this page), but it is labeled "prelimiary version". Regard3D compiles and runs using this compiler, but some of the third-party programs do not. The same goes for GCC from MacPorts. This compiler also works, but not on some of the third-party programs.

This is why I worked around the problem by using the Threading Building Blocks library by Intel. It is not too difficult to replace OpenMP calls with calls to TBB. I did this now for the compute matches stage, maybe I will add more in future versions.

Surfaces with textures

Surfaces with textures (OBJ file format) are now loaded with AssImp. This is mainly since loading OBJ files with AssImp is faster. The importer from OpenSceneGraph, which was previously used, also had a bug which rotates the model incorrectly. This is now fixed. There is a drawback however: If you created a surface model with textures with Regard3D 0.7.0 and you are trying to open it  with Regard3D 0.7.1, it might be invisible. In such a case, simply click on the button "Reset orientation", and you should see your model again.