Introduction

I ran the same photoset through three different photogrammetry software packages and uploaded the results to Sketchfab. A few things I should mention first is that I have the most experience with Metashape and much less experience with 3DF Zephyr and RealityCapture.

I should also mention that for each of these scans I used Metashape “import masks from model” to mask the photos before running alignment. It would have been a big task to manually mask all of the images and difficult to get the same precision. I detailed out my general turntable workflow in this post which explains the masking technique.

Agisoft Metashape

I got the best result with Metashape, but as I mentioned, it’s what I’m most familiar with. That said, I do think that it has the best and most useful set of tools. I also think that the whole UI is really well laid out and intuitive.

Created in Agisoft Metashape v1.8.0 using 205 photos.

3DF Zephyr

I was really pleased with the quality of the mesh that 3DF Zephyr produced. At first glance the texture also looked really photorealistic, but I could not get the color blending settings correct enough to compensate for the changes in lighting when I shot the keyboard from different angles. So it has a few seams, which is a shame because other than that I like everything else about it.

Created with 3DF Zephyr v6.010 using 201 photos.

RealityCapture

The RealityCapture scan has some really nice things about it, but it also has some glaring issues. The shape of the keys is accurate and consistent, and the texture is super crisp. But something unfortunate happened with the spacebar and it has a big divot carved into it. I also wrestled a bit to eliminate the color seams, but I was able to find some agreeable texture settings through trial and error.

I could probably edit the mesh by deleting the divot and then closing the hole, but I didn’t insert any other manual tweaks for the other two scans so I wanted to keep things somewhat even.

Created in RealityCapture by Capturing Reality from 192 images.

Conclusion

Though I prefer Metashape, the few times I’ve played around in 3DF Zephyr I got the impression that it had a similar set of useful tools that work well together. I don’t really find RealityCapture intuitive, but I do think that it produces a very nice result with most photosets without even needing to stray from the default settings. It could use some bells and whistles offered by the other two such as an image masking feature.