Sketchfab Community Blog - » Agisoft Metashape for Beginners

This article is going to skip the image capture step, as that’s covered elsewhere. We’ll instead focus on what to do once you have your photos and you’re ready to move into Agisoft Metashape.

In this brief tutorial, we’ll cover:

Adding your images to Metashape

Go to Workflow > Add Photos or click the “Add photos” icon (three overlaid rectangles with a “+”) in the Workspace. Select the photos that you want to add. Once you’ve added them, they should appear in the Workspace.

The typical workflow

Align photos

Go to Workflow > Align Photos. When the alignment popup appears, you can select your own settings or follow Agisoft’s recommended alignment settings:

Click ok.

Once photo alignment has completed, verify that the sparse point cloud looks roughly the way you expect it to (i.e., like the object that you photographed) and that the bounding box does not clip any of the scanned object. If it does, you can resize or rotate the bounding box with the bounding box tool.

Build dense cloud

Go to Workflow > Build Dense Cloud. When the dense cloud popup appears, you can select your own settings or follow Agisoft’s recommended dense cloud settings:

Click ok.

Once dense cloud generation has completed, you can clean up rogue points that you don’t want to be included in the mesh using one of several techniques:

• Use the selection tool to select the exact points that you want to delete and press Delete or Backspace on your keyboard.
• Go to Tools > Dense cloud > Select points by color to delete only points of a particular color (e.g., whatever the color of your background is). This technique may be less effective if the color that you are trying to remove is also scattered throughout the model. Nevertheless, you can select the points and decide whether the selection is accurate before you hit Delete.
• If you selected “Calculate point confidence” in the dense cloud settings, you can go to Tools > Dense Cloud > Filter by confidence to limit your model to the points calculated with the greatest degree of confidence. Start with small numbers for the minimum (e.g., 2, 3, or 4). If you don’t like what you see, just click on Tools > Dense Cloud > Reset filter.

Build mesh

Go to Workflow > Build Mesh. When the mesh popup appears, you can select your own settings or follow Agisoft’s recommended mesh settings:

Click ok.

Depending on the state of your mesh, you may want to Decimate Mesh, Smooth Mesh, or Close Holes (all available in Tools > Mesh).

Build texture

Go to Workflow > Build Texture. When the texture popup appears, you can select your own settings or follow Agisoft’s recommended texture settings:

Click ok.

Exporting your model to Sketchfab

To upload your model directly to Sketchfab, go to File > Upload Data.

From the app menu, select Sketchfab. Pick “Model” from the Source Data dropdown. Enter a title and description for your model (these can always be changed once the model is in your account on Sketchfab). Enter your API key, which you can find in your Sketchfab account settings under API token.

Set whether you want the model to be Private (a setting available to members with a Pro subscription and above) or Draft (available to everyone) and click ok. The “Password” box is for if you want to password protect a private model (again, a Pro and above feature).

And that’s it! Once your model is uploaded, you can make it look even better using Sketchfab’s 3D Editor.