I need to use lens distortion calculated in Syntheyes. I thought there was a way to generate an STMap but that might have been a custom tool at one of the places I freelance because I can’t find anything like that in Syntheyes now. Following @joelosis tutorial, I’m guessing I need to install SyLens matchbox but I can only find it on Github, which is a little beyond my technical skills. I Sudo the installer but I get an error in the terminal that says: find: /usr/discreet/*: No such file or directory
Anybody know what I need to do to get this working? Or some other way to get the distortion values into a Batch?
(I hope y’all appreciate the herculean effort it took for me not to name this post “The Sound of SyLens”)
Ah, that’s where it was. Thanks! I did all sorts of google searches about Syntheyes, stmaps and distortion before I started this thread and the closest I came was a post from Russ saying real 3D artists don’t need a distortion map
Ha! And I find it can be a little cryptic digging through the sheer amount of information he has on the site (it’s… dense… and difficult to navigate very effectively)
Wait.,…are you talking about Syntheyes or his website?
I love Syntheyes. Wait…I love the idea of Syntheyes. It’s brilliantly fast, anyone should be able to afford it, and its licensing scheme is easier than most. But, I struggle with using it. It feels cryptic in places, like, I need a special handshake to be a able to click on a tracker and delete it but haven’t waved the right kind of salt over my left thigh in the right direction. Plus, the one feature I need it for most, image modeling and texture extraction, has different pipelines for extracting a still and extracting an image sequence, which triggers me. I know, I’m working on it.
I do love me some PFTrack. But, its website, documentation, user support, and licensing scheme is abysmal. It’s probably just me, but, I really struggle with PFTrack on a simple home network trying to split up a single license between a few machines.
I finally figured out why most people would rather crack PFTrack than buy it. They don’t want to deal with the annoying PFBucket and Entitlement crap. I’m not entitled to it…I just spent a few grand on it! It’s mine you bastards!
Hey Randy!
I use it mainly for just straight matchmoving, so the modeling and texturing side of it I haven’t gotten into much (aside from triangulating rough meshes from points, etc.) However, one part of Syntheyes I’ve realized over the years is that it is definitely beneficial for me to do more and more with the keyboard hotkeys.
For instance, in what you’re describing with deleting trackers, if you have the magic wand active in the tracker panel, it’s frustrating when you’re just barely missing it and keep making new trackers over and over, so I keep the wand off and just hold down ‘C’ and left click to make new trackers, thus avoiding new useless tracker hell. And there’s some things I don’t even know without a hotkey, such as continuing a track after it leaves frame or is occluded by using the ‘Z’ key.
All in all, I really like Syntheyes, I’ve never used PFTrack, but I’ve heard good things, as with 3DE. Like you said though, Randy, that pricepoint and speed for Syntheyes is just delicious.
