Hi,
I flied my drone with the drone deploy app.
what made my map so distorted and incomplete like this?
Hey @rotibanana, welcome. What drone and mobile device are you using? What type of flight plan did you use? Can you share the map?
I’m using DJI Mavic 2 Pro and Iphone 6S to fly this.
I just fly with the automatic settings with flight altitude 35m.
This is my map, with red border indicate how my flight plan:
My initial thoughts are that you were too low for the type of subject you were capturing. 35m agl is fine but greatly reduces the field of view for each picture taken, especially when the gap gets reduced as you fly over buildings tree etc. What’s worsened it in this instance is the great expanse of roof cladding without texture. It’s made it impossible for DD to process.
You could try to process them again, but I think you’d be better off flying again at a minimum of 50-60m. Any further away and you will lose resolution. Any closer and you run the risk of getting blank spots like you have.
I agree, process it again. Which mode did you use? Terrain or Structure? I would try the opposite and if that doesn’t work then email support.
Also in agreeance with @JamesC on altitude, but when you account for the height of the buildings you are probably only 40m from the subject… just something to think about.
I had a similar issue two weeks ago, I put in a Support ticket so the DD Engineers could take a look at why a 3500+ photo map had swirls (away from the edges) and some other issues (with RCPs, concrete pipes). Two days ago they tweaked their code and reprocessed the Map, it took care of about 99% of the issues I seen. There is still a little issue with the RCPs and the Equipment that is sitting still on the site (contractor wasn’t working that day), so it should have been a excellent Map.
So like suggested, try reuploading the photos and see what the results are or contact DD Support with the url to the Map in question and they can reprocess it on their side.
To anyone that reads this. Letting the engineers tweak around helps us all! If you are confident in your map and something just isn’t right then let them play! As always, if you have an urgent matter reprocess immediately and contact them. If you don’t get a quick response get back here.
Thanks JamesC. I thought flying at a lower
altitude improves the resolution but didn’t take note of this
issue that you mentioned. I’ve processed several times and even
tried with another software, still to no avail. I’m gonna travel
to the site again and fly at a higher altitude to try. Another 5
hours drive… sigh.
If you want to fly really low to get the resolution I would suggest doing one high altitude flight that will help the lower images stitch. At least 225ft. For larger site you can go even higher to get it quickly without consuming too much battery.
From the Flight Plan you drew up I see several issues with flying low, what was your Overlaps? and you should have flown a larger area and cropped it down afterwards.
I fly around 110’ (roughly 35m) a lot and have 16+ photos/pixel (0.4in/pixel) , 75% Front Overlap and 65% Side Overlap (normally I do 80%/80% Overlaps between 80’ to 150’, because I want to make sure I don’t drive back).
Here is the Map for above (116ac):
This is a house close to the edge of the map:
Here you can see how close to the edge of Map (North edge) I was, granted I was flying for the homes.
Another reason why one high flight helps. It gives you much more information outside of the polygon that you are focusing on so if you slightly short an area you can bring it back out. This is very common with construction sites as you never really know how closely the planned LOC was followed and many times agreements are made in the field to extend certain areas that we have no idea about. I had a flight a while back that they added a 200ft x 400ft area for stockpiles just on the outside of the limits of construction and I only saw it and caught it without another trip because I had plenty of data outside that I saw it in the live map, immediately landed, adjusted the plan and re-flew. I would be interested to see what live map would have shown you on this flight…
The red rectangle is the site but I overflew to ensure I had all the data I needed.
I did fly a 200’ flight but the results wasn’t as good.
In this Map you can see holes in the tops of the trees (along the left side) and water and in cropped the River area. This was flown on a High Wind day 13mph to 22mph, gotta love RTK Drones. I need to look at the 200’ Blue Dot Map and see if DJI Terra missed any photos along the left side (that could account for holes in the map)
Hey guys, I drove back to the site and flew another time with 50m altitude… hope this will help.