Managing partial updates on large ContextCapture projects

Problem

You have an area (a city, or just a construction site) photographed and 3MX model completed.

Some changes have been made (in a city a new building raised or the whole block rebuilt; or on the construction site some new parts are built).

How you can incorporate new photos and the changes on certain areas into an existing model, so that the whole model does not have to be regenerated?

Take photos of the new area of interest
Ensure the new dataset includes enough photos to generate a good 3D model of the area that has changed.

Create a new block (in the same Project as the major area) with the new photos

Do an aerotriangulation on the new block ensuring that it is correctly georeferenced relative to the initial block (use Ground Control points or derive GCP from the initial scene)

Create a new reconstruction (of the new changed areas) with the same tiling (SRS, tile size, tiling origin) as the original reconstruction.

Produce the tiles in 3MX format with the same settings (same SRS, same SRS origin). Ensure that the same parameters are used for the Reconstruction and Production so that the old and new tiles are perfectly matched.

Note:
Using this method there are likely to be texture discrepancies at the tile limit (due to the capturing being done at different times).

Original Author:

Felix James

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