Agisoft ships Metashape 1.7
Agisoft has released Metashape 1.7, the latest version of its photogrammetry software, introducing a new depth map generation algorithm to better reconstruct thin objects.
Users of the Professional edition, aimed at aerial surveys, get integration with terrestrial laser scan data, automatic detection of power lines, and a new system to automatically mask blurred areas of source images.
The photogrammetry tool formerly known as PhotoScan
Originally known as PhotoScan, Agisoft’s software quickly became popular among games and VFX artists to generate 3D scans of people or objects from reference photos.
The resulting dense point clouds or 3D meshes can be exported in a range of standard formats, including OBJ, FBX, Alembic and glTF, with HDR textures and support for UDIMs.
Last year, with Agisoft’s growing focus on aerial surveys in the Professional edition of the software, the product was renamed Metashape.
New in Metashape 1.7: better depth map generation, out-of-core processing on GPUs
Key changes in Metashape 1.7 include a new algorithm for generating depth maps, intended to result in more fine detail and less noise in the resulting 3D model.
You can see a side-by-side comparison with the previous release at 01:10 in the video above.
Users also report that time taken to generate depth maps is significantly shorter.
Other performance improvements support for out-of-core processing for point cloud data, making it faster to process data sets too large to fit into GPU memory; and the option to downscale textures.
Changes significant to integrating Metashape into production pipelines include support for Python 3.8.
Professional edition only: integration with terrestrial laser scans, automatic identification of power lines
The Professional edition gets a number of other major new features, including support for terrestrial laser scan data, making it possible to align it with the photogrammetric data generated by Metashape.
Users can then reconstruct a 3D surface based on the combined depth information, which should fill in the holes in either data set, and result in more detail in the resulting mesh.
Building on the AI-driven land use classification system introduced in Metashape 1.5, the software can also now automatically identify power lines in aerial images and export a corresponding 3D polyline.
In addition, a new automated system generates masks for out-of-focus areas of source images: among other things, making it possible to prevent them from being used to generate textures.
Workflow improvements include the option to use a 3D controller to navigate a scene in Terrain navigation mode, and new display options for DEM and orthomosaic data in the Model view.
Pricing and system requirements
Metashape 1.7 is available for Windows 7+, Debian/Ubuntu Linux with glibc 2.13+ or macOS 10.13+. The Standard edition costs $179 for a node-locked licence; the Professional edition costs $3,499.
The software is GPU-accelerated via OpenCL, and supports both AMD and Nvidia graphics cards.
Read a full list of new features in Metashape 1.7 in the online changelog