off topic: archviz birdview stills camera matching howto?

[digitarch]

After several (unsuccessfull) tries wit the old 3dsmax camera matching point helpers and also with the new 3dsmax perspective matching utility I would like to ask all the successfull archiz-artists how they match their shots.

We often get wide angle still shots from drones like Phantom Vision carrying lots of exif datas like apertue, focal length, gps-data, we have the corresponding arch drawings and reference measures from existing buildings in the shots but don´t get the exact matching, left with the feeling of roughly stumbling around with the camera.

Do you use specialized software or what´s the trick?

Looking forward to get illuminated, Matthias

[digitarch]

In the meantime looked at PFMatchit and Syntheyes, more or less same price. Somebody has experiences with matching birdseye stills?

[super gnu]

usually do it by eye.. with a bit of practice its much quicker than trying any fancy automated methods.. when doing animation with heli footage thats a different matter.. i use boujou in this case.

im not sure what camera you are using on your drone, but are you correcting for lens distortion before trying to align?

[theedge]

I almost always do it by eye too. Knowing the lens width removes one big parameter from the equation.
If I have several aerial shots to do I run them through Syntheyes so I get all the cameras in one go.

[chriserskine]

I find gps works pretty well as a starting point for heli shots. then go by eye. though I've only done real heli + dslr matching. which are taken a lot further away than a drone. you also need a gis workflow to get gps points into max.

ground level gps is useless. so if you drone shots are close i wouldn't bother with it. I also imagine you have some pretty weird distortion going on too with the drone cameras.

[digitarch]

lens correction as the "first big step" really helps if there are lcp-files provided by adobe or camera manufacturer. often the drones have weirdcheapultrawideanglefisheyelenses - is it really try and error then? It takes more time matching the view than creating the 3d-scene (thanks to vray). I´ll go for the syntheyes 15-days-trial, maybe that helps a bit.
Matthias