Completing the Jarlshof Photogrammetry Mesh

The mesh below was created from ten sections of photogrammetry taken with a camera on an eight meter pole in December last year. Although this mesh covers most of the site I was keen to aim for more complete coverage so one of the jobs for my return visit in April was to capture the remaining material needed to fill the holes.



I took a printout of the above plan view of the mesh back on site so that I could target the areas of sparse coverage, highlighted in red. In addition I wanted to extend the mesh into all four corners of the boundary fence and add some low level detail to the enclosed broch wheelhouse structures.



The coloured sections in this images represent the supplementary data captured in April, while the original data is shaded in grey. Over that last few days I've been processing and aligning these sections using the Iterative Closest Point alignment tool in Meshlab. I'm quite happy with the consistency of coverage at this point and the next stage is to stitch these sections together into one seamless mesh.

The original data consisted of 2.8 million vertices and I am adding an additional 0.9 million to that so am expecting the re-meshing process to require even more patience than usual. Once I have a single master mesh this can be broken down into more manageable chunks for texturing and rendering.