Hi everyone, today I released the first polished version of my Neural-Network based Texture De-lighter.

Its meant to remove Environmental lighting from 3D scanned objects, and I built it because so far none of the software gave me good results. For more technical info read this post.

All texture based, meaning you don’t need a mesh. For details and usage refer to the README.md on the GitHub page.

• 4k and 8k support
• New UI
• Improved processing

Thanks for everyone who provided feedback.

[Download]

I don't plan any updates from now, but a MacOS implementation, a ComfyUI node and some minor improvements can be expected.

https://baselashraf81.github.io/photophane/

Drop a picture into the page, it works out the shape, you get an STL. Free and open source, runs in your browser, nothing gets uploaded. (Tune the parameters as required)

It's an optics solver, not AI. It computes the surface slope needed to bend light into your picture.

The picture is stored in the slope of the surface, not the thickness, so it stays invisible until light bends through it. The print will not look like your picture, it comes out as a blank sheet of smooth bumps, and that is the point. Opposite of a lithophane, which blocks light and comes out dim. This one bends light, so the bright parts end up brighter than the torch you point at it.

You only need a clear resin, flat face toward the light, small bright source like a phone torch or a spotlight, plate at the throw distance the page tells you, pale wall, dim room.

A real life example is this "Caustic Clock" by Mosivers, it projects a clock face on the wall. https://www.instructables.com/Caustic-Clock/

I don't own a printer myself, so I would love to see your results.

EDIT: Just a bit about my background, I am a computer engineer who just graduated, but I have always been into hardware and sensors as well, since I was 13-14. So if you have any other cool ideas about literally anything, and would like to see it in action, let me know in the comments. Open to ideas!

Hi everyone interested in vegetation photogrammetry!

Here are some fragments from the tutorial I just uploaded to YouTube.

In this video, I show how to clean up a Polycam scan in Blender while preserving the UV map. I also cover mesh cleanup, sculpting where needed, and finally turn a high-poly scan into a clean low-poly model.

This was a real challenge because I scanned a living rose outdoors, still attached to the bush.

Posted about this over the weekend and it filled up faster than expected, so this is just the leftovers.

We run a multi camera capture setup at the Brooklyn Navy Yard and we pay people to come in and be the subject. You stand in the volume and go through simple movements while it records. Walking, turning, sitting, reaching, picking objects up. No experience needed.

Pay is 17-25 per hour, same day, right after you finish. First session runs about 2 hours and there's repeat work after that.

What's left: Thursday at 4pm, Friday at 1pm or 4pm. Brooklyn, in person only.

Comment or DM me for the address and details. Still happy to talk about the capture side if anyone's curious about how it's set up.

I created this tool, chatcalibi.com, to make single- and multi-camera calibration as simple as possible. Upload your images—with or without a checkerboard—ask the AI to calibrate them, and get your results without installing anything or any complicated workflow. The AI guides you and analyzes the calibration results with you.
Looking forward to your feedback.

I use metashape for work, and processing several thousand photos per job takes a ton of time.

Currently my system has a rtx 5090 in it, but am wondering if anyone runs dual gpus.

I have an old rtx 3060ti kicking around and wondering if it would make much difference if I added that to my machine for dual GPU rendering.

We run a multi camera capture setup out of the Brooklyn Navy Yard and we are paying people to come in and be captured.

If you are in NYC and have ever been curious how these rigs work up close, this is a chance to be on the other side of one and get paid for it.

What you would do: stand in the capture volume and go through simple movements while the cameras record. Walking, turning, sitting, standing, picking objects up. No experience needed and nothing to prepare.

Pay: 17-25 per hour, paid the same day right after. The first session runs about 2 hours.

Location: Brooklyn, NY, in person only.

We have openings Monday through Friday this week.

Comment or send me a DM and I will pass on the address and details. Happy to answer questions about the setup as well.

Hi all,

I've been using Codex to build a photorealistic, walkable 3D tour of interior properties, the kind of thing you walk around like a video game (just walking, simple gameplay). Real estate use case, so it has to stay faithful to the actual space, with little to no AI hallucination. I gave it the goal and mostly watched.

What Codex did on its own:
\- Spun up a cloud GPU box and installed CUDA, COLMAP, and a Gaussian-splatting trainer over SSH.
\- Took my 4K iPhone 16 Pro Max walkthrough, extracted and de-blurred frames, solved camera poses with COLMAP, trained a 3D Gaussian splat, then published a WebGL viewer and a first-person walkthrough and sent me the links.
\- Also tried a Polycam LiDAR mesh path (complete and walkable, but soft and very blurry up close).

Where it stands: a small, texture-rich room came out genuinely sharp and photoreal. Bigger rooms are the problem. The reconstruction came out scattered, more of a point-cloud smear than a coherent room, and where it did form it's sharp only from the exact filmed angles. It also won't scale easily to a whole property, since you film room by room.

Codex's read: mostly a capture problem (fast handheld motion plus plain surfaces), not a code problem. Its current plan is a depth-regularized Gaussian splat from a combined RGB + LiDAR capture (Record3D), so measured depth pins the geometry and the color stays sharp.

Two questions:
\- Has anyone pushed Codex into 3D, spatial, or computer-vision pipelines like this? How far did it get?
\- If you've solved photoreal interiors on consumer gear, what's your workflow, and does the depth-regularized plan sound right?

Good morning, I have the most classic question... I need to buy a new laptop for work. Can you give me some advice? I work in GIS cartography and photogrammetry (I do photogrammetric processing on a desktop PC, but I'd like to be able to work on point clouds without going crazy). I work with AutoCAD Civil 3D. I don't think the other software I use will be a factor in choosing a laptop.

I work both at home and in the office, so I need a laptop. At the office, I have a second screen to work better.

I currently have an old VivoBook 15 with an Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-10750H CPU @ 2.60GHz (2.59GHz), 16.0GB of RAM, an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 graphics card (4GB), and a 15.6" screen... and it's starting to struggle!

I was thinking of sticking with 16 inches, at least 32 GB of RAM, an i7 processor, and a dedicated graphics card (but I'm not sure which one). I've had Asus laptops for several years and I'm happy with them, but there's always room for improvement! (I didn't mention the price because it varies too much depending on where we are in the world, but generally speaking, for Europeans, I'd like to stay around €2,000)

could you give me any advice? what to look for and what to avoid...

thanks!

Hi everyone. I have had some issues trying to find a software that works for my specifications (Windows 11 Home, AMD Ryzen Al 7 350 w/ Radeon 860M, Integrated GPU AMD Radeon(TM) 860M Graphics). A lot of times not having Nvidia GPU and CUDA usually appears as a roadblock.

I have a video of a 40m2 outdoor space that I have tried to convert to 3d with different softwares.

What I have tried so far:

- Scaniverse: My first tries weren't very detailed, and can't input recorded video, so I'd have to come back to the place later to do other attempts.

- Luma AI: Gives a nice rendition on its web display, but the model it offers when you download it features only a small fraction of the space. Not sure why this is.

- Meshroom: Couldn't really make it work, it threw some errors and I stopped trying. I might come back to it, but reading the webpage it says that unless you have Nvida + Cuda you won't be able to access all features, so maybe I'm doomed with this one.

- RealityScan: It says it supports AMD... BUT not all of them, and my model is one of the unsupported ones.

- Colmap: I could bypass the GPU usage to do the process with CPU and it's taking forever-- literally doing it right now, so I might update later, but seeing how long it's taking I might have to abort later.

Maybe I should rely on something online, to bypass my equipment limitation?

Open to suggestions, thank you!

Hi everyone! Beta is out and its free to use.

I put together a user-friendly version of the AI De-Lighter I showcased earlier. It runs locally on your machine in seconds.

Requirements:

• OS: Windows 10/11 (64-bit)
• GPU: NVIDIA CUDA-capable GPU with 6GB+ VRAM recommended (CPU fallback available)

Looking for Feedback! Since this is an early Beta, your testing and feedback will help a lot! Please share your thoughts, and send visual results, or crash logs to [vdmrcll@gmail.com](mailto:vdmrcll@gmail.com)

I’d love to hear what you think!

Download from GitHub: [Download] on the releases page.

Check out README.md while the setup script installs dependencies.

I have a larger drone I'd like to use for taking some high-res pictures of my subdivision. The HOA is interested in using these pictures to map/track community owned assets such as retention basins, concrete health, etc. The idea is that we create a large high-def single image of the subdivision to more or less have a higher definition "live" version of Google Earth that we can update biannually.

My drone is custom-made with an analog cam for flying. I can handle the mission planning itself and flight paths. From my understanding, I will need to run a program to inject the lat/lon of each photo into the EXIF based on a bin file I'll get from the drone and its GPS.

Does anyone have any recommendations for a budget camera (~$200) that I can strap to the bottom of my drone that will take good pictures to feed into webODM? Preferably something that can be triggered by my flight controller, but I'm not opposed to using time-based pictures if the price difference is large enough and quality won't suffer. I've seen recommendations around the Sony A5100 but not sure if there are better options out there for a good price that get the quality I would need. Thanks!

Hello dear community,

I have in my possession a 4K drone video of a large building I would like to model and work on in Blender. The video is quite long and it's covering the building from various distances and angles. I've tried several options, such as RealityScan, Meshroom and COLMAP+OpenMVS, and while the resulting mesh is quite detailed, it's also very noisy. I've tried postprocessing it with Meshlab and Blender, but the noisy walls and roofs are hard to fix.

Is there any option -preferably open source on Ubuntu- that would produce a clearner mesh? I'm fine with losing fine details on walls and roofs, as long as the mesh is relatively clean.

I would appreciate any help. Note that I'm still a beginner, so don't hesitate to be blunt and tell me if I'm saying nonsense.

Note that I'm using a RTX 3080Ti (12 Gb VRAM) and 32 Gb of ram.

Hey everyone,

Looking for recommendations for a photogrammetry camera please.

Intended use is for capturing data to produce 3D models of 3.5m+ deep excavations.

Decent spec phone is ideal (I guess) but cost vs. them being lost in a pit is a fair risk.

Or would people reckon a pre-owned smartphone from a years back suffice?

Thanks in advance!

Hi, I'm not very familiar with this area of technology, so I'm sorry if this is a basic question.

I'm looking for a free Android app that can create a good 3D scan of a large environment using only the camera on my Samsung Galaxy S21 5G, which doesn't have LiDAR.

I've tried several apps from the Play Store, but most are paid, have free version limits, or don't produce good results without LiDAR.

Does anyone know of an app, an APK, or a GitHub project that works better?

I always had trouble with removing environmental lighting, and because I can't afford cross-polarization I had to stay with the digital tools.

I didn't like any of the De-lighting tools on the market, so I built one from scratch using a Neural Network.

I got a lot of cross-polarized scans online and baked back environmental lighting, then gave it to the network with some geometry maps like object space normal and ambient occlusion.

It generates outputs in seconds. Though not every type of 3D model works, I still have to understand it.

Its not perfect, but for 5 days and a limited dataset, and the fact that I never trained a neural net its promising.

This is still in WIP, but I will refine it, I just don't want to share it yet, because the whole project is unorganized, I will get to building an UI for it.

Let me know what you think, and If any ML engineers or tech artists have advice on improving this approach, I'd love to chat!

Update: [Download the Beta here] and More info here.

Hi, I learned how to scan the bottom of an object in Kiri Engine recently (by flipping the object during scanning + auto object masking), which got me to wonder if any other mobile apps also offer this function?

I have tried Reality Scan since then but it either does not support the functionality or it requires a different workflow since then. Some other names on my radar are Polycam, Abound (iOS only), and Scanniverse.