Workflows

Reconstruction

Sparse clouds, dense clouds and textured meshes, either from a shot or from a folder of photos.

There are two ways in, depending on what you're starting with: a moving camera shot, or a set of photographs.

From A Shot

Auto Track already gives you a sparse point cloud along with the camera solve. Densify turns that into something you can actually build geometry from.

Import as Footage
  -> Auto Track
  -> Refine Cloud       (optional, but worth doing)
  -> Densify
  -> Output 3D

Densify is the expensive step. It runs OpenMVS over every solved frame and wants a CUDA GPU with a decent amount of VRAM. Running Refine Cloud first is usually worth it: fewer bad points going in means fewer bad points coming out, and the whole thing finishes sooner.

From Photos

If you have a set of photographs instead of a shot, skip tracking completely.

Images Folder
  -> Photogrammetry
  -> Output 3D: Mesh

Photogrammetry runs the whole pipeline by itself: matching, solving, densifying, meshing and texturing. It reads camera RAW files as well as JPEG and PNG.

When shooting, overlap your photos generously, keep the lighting even, and don't change focal length between shots if you can help it.

Splitting A Solve Apart

Separate Track Elements takes an Auto Track and hands you the three pieces separately:

Auto Track -> Separate Track Elements -> Camera
                                      -> Point Cloud
                                      -> Lens Data

Useful when you want the camera without the cloud, or when you want the solved lens to feed a Lens Distortion node.

Getting It The Right Way Up

A fresh solve comes out in arbitrary space. Wrong scale, tilted, origin in a useless spot. The Align Scene panel in the 3D Viewport sidebar sorts that out:

1. Select point cloud vertices on the ground and press Floor.
2. Select points along something that should run down an axis, press X or Y.
3. Select a point where you want the origin and set it.
4. Select two points you know the real distance between, type the measurement, apply scale.

Do them in that order. If you level the floor after rotating, you undo the rotation.

One Lens, Several Shots

When several shots came off the same lens, Multi-Shot Lens solves them together so they end up sharing one consistent lens model. Connect each shot's Auto Track to a numbered input and you get a matching output back for each one.