This tutorial illustrates how to remove lighting from the texture automatically in Agisoft Metashape Professional software. The tool is targeted at smoothing out the light and dark sides of an object model in the case of soft lighting in the original scene. Optionally ambient occlusion shadows can be removed too (types of textures in Metashape are described in the article - Working with textures). Please note that delighting in strong shadows is not supported.
Contents of this article:
Applicability
Generally, removing shadows and recovering lighting-neutral color while preserving texture features is impossible - at least because of ambiguity between dark texture produced by shadows on the surface and dark texture produced by dark regions of the surface. But in practice in many cases heuristics based on some assumptions can provide good results.
Texture delighting tool smooths out dark and light sides of the object model and can add light up surface areas that were found to be too dark with respect to ambient occlusion map (original model by Francesco Fassi):
- Original model;
- Delighted in single color mode;
- Delighted in single color mode with respect to ambient occlusion map.
1. Open the project with a textured model
Firstly you should open the project with a textured model. The Delighting tool works with imported textured models too. If you want to delight an external textured model - you can create an empty project, add a new chunk with a button Add chunk on the Workspace panel, and then import a textured mesh with Tools > Import > Import Mesh.
2. Duplicate model
To be able to compare the delighted texture with the original one afterward, you should preliminarily duplicate the model and then delight only the second one. To duplicate the model, right-click on 3D Model > Duplicate... > Yes
3. Remove lighting
Use Tools > Mesh > Remove Lighting...
- Color mode: use Single color if the model is homogeneous (like marble statue or rock), and use Multi color if the scene presents a combination of colors (like marble statue on black rock).
- Presets: preset configures advanced parameters for some special cases. The only special case supported for now - Aggressive preset, it is adjusted for delighting of rocks, but still sometimes can lead to artifacts.
- Ambient occlusion map: optionally you can load into Metashape ambient occlusion texture map and the tool will try to recover ambient occlusion dark areas on the model.
Delighting result (Single color mode, default preset, with ambient occlusion texture map):
Delighting result (Multi color mode, default preset, with ambient occlusion texture map):
Forum discussion
Discuss the delighting tool and share your results on our forum!
Examples
The Dying Gaul (original model by Geoffrey Marchal):
- Original model;
- Delighted in single color mode;
- Delighted in single color mode with ambient occlusion map.