A lot of drone pilots who dream of using their machines to scan the world likely find those dreams crashing to earth when they learn the price of photogrammetry software. Some packages cost far less than others, but Meshroom can’t be beat for its price point. If you want free drone scanning software, here it is.
In Part I, I showed how I used DJI Mini2’s quickshot Circle mode to do a quick 360-degree video of a sculpture. The video was then converted into stills, and the stills loaded into Meshroom. Meshroom then calculates what the object must look like in three-dimensional space and outputs the results as an .obj file. Amazing.
Although I should have taken more close up shots of the sculpture’s face.
If you hope to make a 3D model of the file, however, there’s some editing to do. All of the stuff we don’t want to print must be removed.
I use Blender (free!) for this. And I’m afraid this is the bottleneck. Blender is even more miraculous than Meshroom, but its…
