Adding an outdoor 3D model

To add an outdoor model to a 3D tour you will need to upload a .zip of the outdoor model in the "reprocessing" section of the Tour Editor.*

Requirements:

• The outdoor model must be compiled into an archive .zip folder.
• The archive should contain one .OBJ file, one .MTL file and textures. The names of the files don't matter.
• The outdoor 3D model should have no more than 500,000 faces and a decent amount of textures (for example 5 8196x8196 px images). Textures will be simplified further.
• The model should be texturized, not colorized using materials.
• Any 3D lighting will be disabled.
• We recommend using RealityCapture or DroneDeploy for creating models from aerial photos, but any model that fit the above requirements can be accepted.

*Before uploading, the model should be aligned correctly according to the following instruction.

Model Alignment

After you have a textured 3D mesh of your outdoor model in .OBJ format, you should manually align it to the indoor mesh. The following instructions will details how to do this with the CloudCompare tool.

1. Download the 3D model from the Tour Editor (Downloads > 3D Model).

2. Load "Package3DModel/textured.obj" mesh into CloudCompare.

3. Load outdoor model to CloudCompare. 

4. Select outdoor model in the left menu and use "Translate/Rotate" tool to roughly align models (but place indoor model above outdoor for now). Warning: DO NOT rotate or move the indoor textured.obj model, in this case, the result would be placed incorrectly!
5. Select both meshes and use the tool "Align two clouds by picking (at least 4) equivalent point pairs". Make sure that the outdoor model is "Aligned" and textured.obj is "Reference".
6. Pick correspondent points on both meshes. It's easier to pick points on windows, because they are visible on both meshes. Select the points as accurately as possible and pick at least two points on each side of the building.
7. Check that "adjust scale" option is selected, XYZ rotation and Tx, Ty, and Tz translation are all enabled, then click "align" button.
8. Now check, that both models are aligned. Check "show * cloud" boxes to disable visibility of some meshes. If the alignment is wrong: you may remove some points and attempt to add others. However, it is usually easier to click the red X and start over from Step 5.
9. After you have successfully aligned the two models, click the green checkmark and save the aligned outdoor mesh. To do this, select only the outdoor mesh and click on save button in upper left corner. Important: Make sure you are saving the model (in .OBJ format), NOT a CloudCompare project.

When the model is ready, compress it to a ZIP archive and upload it to the Tour Editor in the Reprocessing section. After reprocessing is finished, the outdoor mode would become available for this model.