First 3d building attempt! Advice?

Data Processing - Discussion and Q&A
1

Hello,

We are working on our first 3d building model: https://skfb.ly/RH7V

We are flying a Matrice 1000 w/ a DJIX3 camera. In this attempt we flew Nadir photos with 80% overlap in Drone Deploy. We flew 3 point of interest circles (with DJI) - one at 50m (~45 deg), one at 35m (~30 deg), and one 10m (~90deg). We also took several ground level photos for each side of the building by walking around manually snapping pictures while holding the drone. As you can see, the model looks good other than the roof eve blends into the top of the walls and the complex awning above the back door has not turned out well. We mostly avoided horizon in the photos and flew on an overcast day with no shadows.

The questions we have:

  1. In general, any advice?
  2. Should we have incorporated a flight under the awning (3-4m AGL) and pointed the camera upwards to fix the issue with the awning?
  3. How important is a consistent distance/camera angle when snapping manual pictures while holding the drone?
  4. Rather than walking around with the drone, can we take ground level pictures with a celluar Ipad (or is accuracy not good enough?)
  5. We are processing in Drone Deploy - will we need to use Agisoft or some professional software to truly get 3d models that are professional grade (i.e. we want to fly homes for real estate)

Thanks in advance!

2

Model looks good! Came out better then ones I’ve made. How many pictures did you end up taking?

3

Thanks. I believe it was just under 200 photos. Probably overkill, but we had the drone on 1m/s and the camera on repeat every 3 seconds.

4

Hey Guys,

I did exactly this yesterday and here is the result. http://reconaerialmedia.com/3dmodel/

I set the poi directly over the house from about 200 feet to make sure it was centre, came down then moved out to 24 meters and started POI path at 1m/s snapping 111 pics as it flew the path. I would have taken in wider/higher but as it was I was about 1.5 meter from a tree on the perimeter so not possible to take wider AND get the correct angle (so I settled for about 3 meters over the roof line).

I also tried uploading 3 separate passes from different heights and that stitch failed.

The idea to use this as a real estate add-on is cool and that’s why i thought of doing it BUT it’s only useful if it can be embedded into a site where users can actually engage with it. I have checked out Capturing Reality which appears on the surface to be amazing and will export a video walk-through but there isn’t much point to that since I can simply record a video through the POI and get a better image result that the video of the model that comes from the software. My point is that unless the user is engaging with the model (like in Sketchfab) it’s a bit of a redundant exercise.

How do you guys plan to incorporate the model as a usable piece of media? Is there an alternative to SketchFab? BTW if you haven’t tried it sketchfab embeds well into word press as you can see from my link.

best,