I recently did my first Drone Deploy, and it captured a beautiful map and model, but some details were lost and some sides of the buildings were patchy. So I took to the sky again withing the DJI app to snap photos on tripod mode, circling every building in the plaza. This reupload resulted in lower quality than before, and with more patchy areas. Is there something I could have done differently, or should I have done the photos within the Drone Deploy app somehow?
Here is the link:
How much time elapsed between the missions? You uploaded both mission’s photos together?
*edit
…and after looking at the map and the images there are allot of images that have sky/horizon in them. I would upload again removing those.
They were less than two days apart, I uploaded the original, then went to add photos and it republished the map but this time with extra patches of no info and a random building on the road. I’ll try to find and delete those sky photos.
How do I delete the photos from the project? Or do I need to start a new one from the ground up? The photos were two days apart I believe.
Yes, you will need to do a new manual upload.
Did you use GCP’s? If not then the different environment conditions and positions of the satellites could cause problems when you are more than a couple of hours apart. It looks like it might be ok though once you get those sky shots out of there.
I’m sorry I’m rather new to all of this, what are GCPs?
Edit: Ahh the ground control points, I wasn’t sure how to use these. I will redo the entire process with these added.
GCP = Ground Control Points
These are square checkerboard that are placed on the ground and you use a surveyor to get the Lat\Long\Elevation of each GCP and then you can enter them in to DD during the upload process.
So (i don’t think) we don’t need global accuracy, we’re just kind of testing the apps capabilities with our own plaza’s land. Now I know however to not space out the time between top down shots and the lower altitude shots. Maybe the lighting and the sky shots as you said are causing it to run into issues processing the model. I’ll look over the batch of photos and pick out the sky shots and ditch em. Thanks for your help! I’ll post the followup when its loaded.
If you have run the map then you should be able to spot objects to create “rough” GCP’s. While it won’t be super accurate, it will help tie the two different missions together. If you can survey those objects then you can submit a coordinate file with the new upload.
It doesn’t sound like you need GCP’s in the sense of how they are truly used, but it will help tie everything together. If you want to send me an orthomosaic I can put together a file for you.
Like MichaelL was saying, you may not need them for what your doing but there are options that can help you like he said.
Here is a example of what you can do:
Open your Map and Click the highlighted Icon
The Map Detail page will come up, Click the highlighted Icon
Select a area (if you know the Elevation even better) and Click the Push Pin in the location and then Enter the Custom Elevation, Click Calibrate
Now you can do Volumetrics based of a Base Elevation or Exact Elevation
You can use the Distance Tool to create Cross Sections. You can see the washout about 100 marker (along the bottom) and you can see the 2 trees at the 225 marker
These are some of the features that DD can do for you.
Wow, alright so IDK the exact elevations (I’m sort of learning of the drone process for the company I mainly do graphics) … .and when I marked the elevation of the flat concrete as 0 it calibrated everything else with it, now building elevations are making more sense too…very cool. thanks a lot for your images & help !
To start getting up to speed I would look at their great support site.
I’ll definitely read into a lot of these over the weekend, excited for whats to come. thanks a lot Michael.
For sure! One last thing about rough GCP’s is that if you have a project that you will fly continuously it will tie all the maps together so you can do progress measurements because all the maps will be relative to each other. Especially if you don’t have access to survey gear.
I bet our guys in the shop could create some makeshift ones identifiable ones from 300AGL … or we could purchase some online if not. Looks like anything will help with the stitching and measuring, similar to the april tags we’ve made for Leica and Matterport scanning of properties.
Manholes, end of parking stripes and intersections of concrete paving joints all work as well. I use Home Depot and Lowe’s 5 gallon bucket lids. Orange for dark and blue for light areas. It’s my preference because I leave my GCP’s on the site and at $1.50 each I don’t care if they get run over…
Looks like someone already painted a little cross on this inlet…
Tons of manholes… Just make sure to pick ones that are more segregated.
Should I be marking the elevations as 0 since theyre ground level??
We can use the relative elevations from the map you already uploaded and then raise them to an approximate elevation from Google Earth using the single point calibration tool as @GregO suggested. You absolute elevation will be within a couple of feet, but your relative elevations should be less than a foot. We would be able to tell how good it is from the GCP accuracy report you would receive.
Something I should have thought of earlier is to ask what plan you are on. This will determine your access to the GCP process.
Currently just a trial version of the business plan I believe. We’ll be purchasing after this week.