I am trying to create a 3D model of some properties we are doing work on. When i fly around 70-90 ft (I dont like to go higher since the plots are relatively small), the top of the houses look great; however, surfaces that are covered, such as the house entrance and the backyard, look fine 2-3 feet from the edge of the roof and then lose all detail since the drone cant see “inside” from that altitude. All I see is a slope that reaches from the edge of the roof to the floor which I imagine is the boundary of the camera’s FOV when the pictures are stitched. This has proven to be a dealbreaker for me since I bought DroneDeploy to map the properties and the models arent complete enough on most properties for me to be proud to show to my clients.
Anyone have any ideas of how to possibly deal with this situation? I know that we can take pictures by flying the drone manually but I would prefer to avoid this since not all my project managers know how to fly drones. Any help is greatly appreciated.
1 Like
Carry the drone and walk the perimeter. Do you best to only have the subject in the image, no sky or objects that are far away. I made a little rig for a Phantom that I can just carry around like a bag. It’s just some 3/8" nylon rope and a padded grip for a bicycle handlebar. You can loop the rope in a pattern around the arms that will hold it level. I don’t have a phantom anymore but I’ll see if I can get a pic.
Awesome, thanks for the reply! Ill be sure to give it a go next time im out on the field. Just for clarification, when you say carry the drone around the perimeter, would I need to have it on manual flight mode and take pictures as I walk or is there another way I should go about doing this?
Thank you in advance for your help!
1 Like
You can shoot it in whatever software you want, but make sure you are shooting a 4:3 ratio as that is what DroneDeploy uses. I don’t recall if you can do an interval timer in DJI go. We use Litchi for this type of thing and set a 5 second interval to walk around or a 2 second interval if it’s mounted to a vehicle. DroneDeploy manual flight is good as well. You’ll just have to take the pictures yourself which is fine for this type of scenario because you want to make sure you are capturing the exact angles you want in order to catch the detail under the cover.
