Melown Cloud provides a simple way to present your Agisoft PhotoScan model in a web browser complete with surrounding terrain, Bing Maps aerial imagery and OpenStreetMap labels.

To prepare your model for Melown Cloud, first you need to make sure the model is properly georegerenced in some non-local coordinate system as shown in one of the Photoscan tutorials.

We support upload of Agisoft Tiled Model (.tls). To obtain a TLS, first build a tiled model from the mesh: Workflow -> Build Tiled Model…, select ‘mesh’ as data source. Then go to File -> Export Tiled Model… to save the model to a file.

Once you have your TLS file, you can login to Melown Cloud, go to the ‘Datasets’ tab and drop your file onto upload area.

The model undergoes a preliminary analysis and if everything is correct, you should see something like this.

Then push upload. Once the model is uploaded, it is further analyzed and becomes ‘Ready to export’. Melown Cloud uses notion of Datasets and Resources. Datasets represent raw uploaded data while Resources represent processed data that can be composed into a map.

To use your model in Melown Cloud you must therefore ‘Export’ your uploaded dataset into resource. The ‘Export’ button is located in a menu on the right side of the dataset.

If you make a mistake during georeferencing (such as using otrhometric height instead of ellipsoidal), the model may be floating above or below the actual terrain. Melown Cloud will try to detect this issue using global DEM and by analyzing your model. If the model does not fit the terrain, Melown Cloud will offer you to shift the model vertically. In case you do not like the result, you can always reexport the model with different shift. If the georeferencing error is too bad, you will need to correct it in PhotoScan and repeat the whole upload process.

Exporting may take a while, depending on the size of the model.

Once the export is finished, go to ‘Resources’ and into ‘True3D’ tab. There you will see your resource at the top. Click the menu on the right to ‘Create New Map’.

This will create a new map containing your resource, global Viewfinder 3” DEM with Bing Maps aerial imagery and OpenStreetMap labels and take you to the preview tab of this new map centered on your model. You may now choose to use different resources in ‘Resources’ tab, e.g. add some other model you uploaded or pick different global DEM. Or, if you like the preview, you can go directly to ‘Develop and Use’ tab.

The map is not visible from outside Melown Cloud until you click ‘Publish’. After you do, the map becomes accessible by ‘Direct link to map’, you can embed it in your webpage or build some fancy web application on the top of it with our vts-browser-js API.

Ladislav Horký, CTO

Ladislav is the person in charge of all 3D mapping projects carried out in Melown Technologies. As such, he is both an expert in the subtleties of Vadstena, Melowntech's 3D reality-capture system, and a power user of VTS geospatial software stack.