Model Import
RealityCapture (RC) allows importing a model in the Wavefront obj format. The most common use cases are:
- model creation from photographs inside RC,
- model export in the .obj format (mesh possibly with textures),
- post-processing in external software and generating texturing coordinates.
Then you can easily import the model back into RC and bake textures. But you are not limited just to that, you can also do further post-processing,
re-generate texturing coordinates, smooth or simplify the model and so on. You may import as many models as you like, which can be useful
especially when you prefer working with more models in one project.
How to Import
The whole process of importing a model into the application is really straightforward and intuitive. There are just few things you need to follow:
- The Import Model button can be found in the Import part of the MESH MODEL tab.
- After clicking on the Import Model button, you will be asked to specify the location of the model to be imported. You confirm your selection by clicking on Open, which in turn imports the model into the project.
- The 1Ds view screenshot below shows the two possible options of a model. We have imported two of them into a new project. In our case Model 1 has the attribute 'large' because it consists of more parts, while Model 2 is a 'singleton' as it contains only 1 part:
Coordinate System and Texturing
- Export info file contains important information about the coordinate system which was used to export the model. It also contains export parameters which are necessary if you want to import this model back into RealityCapture correctly. The application automatically searches for the .rcinfo file with the same name as the imported object, e.g. myobject.obj.rcinfo.
- If you import a model with UVs, they will be used. If you do not want to use UVs from the obj file, use the Unwrap tool to replace texturing coordinates. UV coordinates for all triangles must be defined, otherwise the file will not be imported and an error message will appear.
- If an (obj) model has also a texture file or more of them connected to it, the image resolution of the texture files will be used instead. The texture file(s) must be linked to the model through the material .mtl file.
- If the (obj) does not have a texture file, then the future texture resolution will be obtained from MESH MODEL / Create Model / Settings / Coloring/Texturing / Imported model default texture resolution.
TIP: You can export, retopologize, create your own UVs and import your model. Afterwards, when you run texturing of the imported model, it will use your own UVs automatically and it will just compute colors of the textels i.e. it will not do the unwrapping.
