Merging Components

A component is a group of images which are aligned together. Sometimes you can get more components, for example when your photo collection contains more than one disjoint physical object, object texture is weak, there are not enough images or the change in perspective is too high, overlap among images is small and RealityCapture could not pair the images automatically.
Here we learn how to merge components by using Merge components tool, providing an additional set of input images, using tie points or ground control points.

There is not any component in the current project. You can continue, but it is better to create some components, so that you can follow these tutorial steps and learn how to merge components which belong together.

There is a single incomplete component in the current project. There are more images which could not be aligned together with this component. Check visually if these images contain your object of interest and consider adding more images at the places which were not covered enough. Adding more images is typically faster than adding control points manually, which is the second option.

You already have a component containing all images. Congratulations!

Components

Where are they?

Open the 1Ds view on the left side. You will see components' names listed here. You can select a component by clicking on its name.
In the 1D/VIEW and SCENE 3D/VIEW there is a Component dropdown menu used to choose which component is going to be displayed (selected). Views are displaying information w.r.t. the selected component.

Which images are registered?

In the 1Ds view you can directly see the number of aligned images for every component. Expand the component node and you will find the names of these images in the Camera poses tree node.
In the 2Ds view you can see a green dot in the top-right corner of each image which is contained in the selected component.

Merging Options

There are more options how to connect a scene which was split into more components.

Run alignment again - RealityCapture will first use special algorithms designed for merging components.
Use Merge Components tool - merge already created components. When using this function, no new images are added to the existing components. You can find this tool in the ALIGNMENT tab.
Control Points - with control points you can manually create a link between two or among more images. Provided additional links, RealityCapture can estimate transformations among images or components.
Ground Control Points - geo-referencing of every component to a common space.
Adding More Images - this is one of the faster options.

Merge Using Images

Step-by-step tutorial