Single-pass photogrammetry

Single-pass photogrammetry is basically what we’ve coined as the art of encapsulating / processing whole entire environments in one full sweep. This has a number of challenges due to the pure size of data acquisition, the scale of point-cloud data required to be processed/baked/repaired. The Homestead itself, not the artwork, was approximately 4Bn points of color/ normal / displacement map details, not large by our standards of today, though back in 2017 this was an extensive challenge. How do you bake this many points down in a single go without running out of memory? We essentially fragment the high to low baking task onto multiple system nodes via a distributed network and then recombine on completion. Though simple in theory, we discovered in practice dealing with such a large amount of data over hundreds of 8k tiles took much trial and error, consistency was key.