Updates to Reality Capture API : point clouds, meshing engines, and geolocation for Infraworks.

The Reality Solutions team is excited to announce the availability of our next generation Forge Reality Capture API.  We’ve designed it from the ground up with construction projects in mind.  It’s available for right now with a long list of new features for you to try out:

1. Point cloud: A brand new multi-view stereo engine created from scratch. This new engine is able to reconstruct much denser point clouds with more details and improved accuracy:
   
   1. Edges of roofs and sides of building structures are preserved during reconstruction.
   2. Small parts like structural beams and pipes are preserved in the point cloud. This will greatly improve the quality of point clouds with a lot of thin parts e.g. pipes in oil refinery factory, structural steel posts and beams, fencing, etc.
   3. Coverage and accuracy of the point cloud is much more accurate. Reference benchmarks below.
2. Meshing engine: A brand new meshing engine resulting in better quality and faster / parallel mesh creation. It is also primed for handling much larger datasets in the future.
   
   1. More complete mesh model. Reconstructed scenes usually come with missing areas from occlusions / texture-less surfaces / missing photo from certain view, etc. The new meshing engine is able to fully utilize accurate position and normal information from new multi-view stereo engine to complete missing areas.
3. Orthoimage quality improvements:
   
   1. Edges of roofs and buildings are clearer and more accurate.
   2. Thin parts are more accurate on ortho images as there is less re-projection errors thanks to the more accurate 3d models.
4. Geolocation support for Autodesk InfraWorks®:
   
   1. Mesh models (OBJ & FBX) are automatically geolocated when imported into InfraWorks®.

Here are some early benchmark results comparing the existing engine (1.0) to the new one (2.0):

To utilize the new engine, specify an additional version=2.0 form parameter when creating a photo scene with the POST /photoscene endpoint. For more details, please refer to the API reference here.

Test it out and let us know what you think by giving us feedback here. 

The Autodesk Reality Solutions Team