2022 PhotoModeler Updates
While many of the improvements apply to multiple application areas, each of these releases had a focus. 2022.0 focused on features used in fabrication, marine jobs, and decking, while 2022.1 focused on features used in forensics and accident reconstruction. There were many smaller improvements and bugs fixed in both releases that help everyone.
2022.0
The 2022.0 release had several changes that help with Coded Target and Surface Draw projects (such as those used in fabrication and marine).
- Default project layers: Do you do the same sort of project over and over and use the same layers in these projects? Default layers will set up your new projects with your predefined layers to speed things up.
- Photo mark size: You can now control the size of the mark symbols on photos which can make them easier to see and help for high-resolution screens.
- Coordinate system fallback: When using the Letter Sheets to automatically set up your project’s rotation (what is ‘up’), PhotoModeler will now fall back to other sheets (B, C, etc.) if sheet A is missing or incomplete in the project.
- Surface Drawing Ease of Use: While in Surface Draw Line or Curve mode, existing Surface Draw points can be moved by clicking and dragging them. This makes it easy to adjust/edit points that were just drawn or to fix/improve existing points without having to switch out of Surface Draw mode.
- New Short Cut Keys: There are some new shortcut keys to help speed up common marine decking and 2D template digitizing tasks: Shift-6 for Surface Draw Curve mode, Shift-E for Export, and Shift-P for Fit Plane.
2022.1
The 2022.1 release had several changes to improve the handling of external and internal point clouds in Premium. Several improvements help those in forensics and accident reconstruction. 
Import Surface Draw Based Pinning
One of the more significant features is Import Pinning to Surface Draw. We have a great video demonstrating the use of Import Pinning on Surfaces. This example uses two different LIDAR point clouds and uses a photo from a TeslaCam dashcam to place another vehicle in the scene cloud and determine its speed. 
Other Improvements
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- Large Point Cloud Improvements. Imported (or DSM-created) point clouds with a large point count will now import faster, save faster, and navigate more smoothly in the 3D View and the Imports View. (Premium)
- Idealized Photo Zoom. Idealizing a photo (removing all the lens distortions), now provides a zoom factor to allow control over the amount of black border in the resulting photo. (Premium)
- Planes from Point Clouds. A Plane object can be created by fitting to points from part of a point cloud object. (Premium)
* Note. There is a 2022.1.1 release that fixes a bug with SmartOrient introduced in 2022.1.0 (manifests as slow orientation processing, misorients, or 3d photo projections).