Image Masking QoL ideas

[KurtH]

It's clear that a number of projects will need additional masking to avoid occlusions or in some cases undesirable reflections from the object itself (or other objects in the room that cannot be mitigated otherwise) negatively impacting the processing.

Two features (that hopefully wouldn't be too difficult to implement down the road) would be in the initial image-based render have a view option to see what image(s?) are being used at that view. So if you see a big white pillow showing up on a dark bronze at a given angle and see it showing up at a specific angle, you know exactly which image to look for to mask. Then (and this may be a feature I have missed) if there is a way to force the Kintsugi builder to reload all (or even better... just a selection) of the images if we did remask. At the moment I'm just re-creating the project.

Of course more automated or on-model image masking would be even nicer, but understandably far more complex and probably not something in a reasonable scope.

[Michael Tetzlaff]

Hi Kurt,

Both of those are great ideas.

Currently, the only way to force it to reload all images is to clear the cache under File > Settings > Cache Settings.  This will reset all projects, though (which shouldn't really matter apart from some longer loading times assuming all photos are still there).  Clearing the cache for just a single project would be a good feature that we could probably implement pretty easily.

I'll add that along with the view filtering idea to our backlog.

[KurtH]

I'm uncertain if in the initial ImageBased view it's only projecting 1, a couple, or way too many images at a single position. But if it's 1 or only a few images, a simple view toggle that lists the current images being projected at this current view might be sufficient to help us narrow down "oh wait when I'm at this angle I'm seeing a Photogrammetry target projected on to the model, I must have missed that in processing. I should either disable that image or mask it" and if there was an option that put in the top corner the name (or list of names) of the image(s) being projected on to the model at that moment.

[Michael Tetzlaff]

It's actually configurable in the settings, but I think by default it's 5 images blended.  The tricky thing is that it in theory actually varies by pixel (depending on the focal length of the real camera compared to the virtual camera, it's possible that at extreme angles, the weights and even the views selected would be different -- and this is even more true if you turn relighting on and the normal vector starts playing a role).  But I think we could still figure out a way to make it work as for most pixels, with relighting off, the weights and view selection shouldn't be too different.