angjminer/blender-import-nvm-addon

Addon to import VisualSFM's NVM files into Blender

Blender-Import-NVM-Addon

Blender addon to import and export Structure-from-Motion (SfM) results using VisualSFM's (http://ccwu.me/vsfm/) NVM file format. Also other SfM software tools like Colmap (https://github.com/colmap/colmap) use this data format.

Tested for Blender 2.78 and 2.79 as well as Ubuntu 14.04 and Windows 10.

Import

In Blender use File/Import/VSFM NVM Import (.nvm) to import the NVM file. There are several import options. You can add the image plane for each camera defined in the NVM file. The corresponding image files must be located in the same folder as the NVM file. There is an option to represent each vertex position with an object using a particle system. This allows you to render the point cloud. A single texture is used to store the color of all particles. The color of the points are shown, if the 3D view is set to "Material".

Export

In Blender use File/Export/VSFM NVM Export (.nvm) to export the NVM file. Select all cameras and objects you want to export. For each selected mesh the vertices are stored as points in the NVM file.

Example

This repository contains an example NVM file. The imported result looks as follows.

Installation

Clone the addon:

git clone https://github.com/SBCV/Blender-Import-NVM-Addon.git

Compress the folder "nvm_import" in "Blender-Import-NVM-Addon" to a zip archive. The final structure must look as follows:

• nvm_import_export.zip/
  • nvm_import_export/
    • nvm_file_handler.py
    • init.py
    • import_nvm_op.py
    • ...

Dependencies

This addon uses Pillow (https://python-pillow.org/) to import the SfM input images.

If you haven't installed pip for blender already, download https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py and copy the file to

<Blender_Root>/<Version>/python/bin

Run

<Blender_Root>/<Version>/python/bin/python get-pip.py 

or

<Blender_Root>/<Version>/python/bin/python.exe get-pip.py 

depending on your operating system.

Finally, install Pillow with

<Blender_Root>/<Version>/python/scripts/pip install pillow

or

<Blender_Root>/<Version>/python/scripts/pip.exe install pillow

respectively.

IMPORTANT: The full path to the pip executable must be provided (./pip install pillow will not work).

License

Blender NVM Import Export Addon Copyright (C) 2018 Sebastian Bullinger

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.