RealityCapture [RC] is a powerful photogrammetry tool that’s been available to the public since 2016, and as expected, has become even more powerful since being purchased by Epic Games (maker of Fortnite and Unreal Engine) in 2021.

I’ve found RC to excel in the generation of 3D models of highly textured objects like riding apparel, non-faired motorcycles, rocks, median barriers, and roadways. Snap a ton of photos, feed them into the beast, pay a few bucks after you’re sure you like the model, and violà, you’ve got point clouds and meshes available for analysis. I haven't had great luck with clean and shiny cars...yet.

In this 2024 SAE paper, Evan Barreiro and the super prolific Neal Carter, evaluated RC’s ability to create 3D point clouds of a roadway and environment, noting that the developers have recently added many features enhancing the program's drone processing abilities. The comparison involved laying out seven Propeller Aeropoints, taking 726 sUAS images of a 2000' length of roadway, and processing the images in RC and Pix4Dmapper. The resultant data was analyzed using CloudCompare. A figure from the paper is shown below, where the scale on the right displays the absolute cloud-to-cloud distance, in meters.

 
 

The authors found 60% of points were within two inches, 85% were within four inches, and 95% were within six inches. Many of the high residual points were in the trees, but the bright green on the roadway is also ~4.5 inches. Considering the point clouds were generated using the same GCPs and photo set, I didn't expect the difference to be so substantial. As noted in the paper though, the point clouds were not compared to terrestrial lidar scanner data. As such, we only know the residual between the RC and Pix data, not the actual error. Comparing the RC point cloud to scan data would be a great follow-up paper for anyone looking for a topic of study. As detailed in this email, there have been (at least) two such studies related to Pix.

Many thanks to Evan and Neal for taking the time and energy to perform this comparison! With publications like this coming out, the continued expansion of RC’s capabilities, and the huge price difference between RC and Pix, I suspect a lot of the community will start eyeballing RC.

Thanks for reading...keep exploring!

Lou Peck
​Lightpoint | Axiom

P.S. I'm heading out with the family to unplug for a couple weeks. The next email will be on July 19th. Happy 4th of July!