I just did a test run over my neighborhood here in Lake Tahoe, after the data was processed I saw these weird black holes in the top of trees… I’m not sure whats going on here but the photos do not have these … 
any ideas?
I have had those as well in areas with trees or large bodies of water.
Good to know im not the only one. I wonder if Drone Deploy guys can look at our data sets to see whats going on?
Hi Gateway, here are a few reasons the holes might have appeared and how to fix it: http://support.dronedeploy.com/docs/making-successful-maps If that doesn’t make sense, I would contact support@dronedeploy.com
Yea thanks but thats not my issue, i have plenty of overlap, flew at about 250 feet up, camera is an Inspire 1 (so no focus functionality) and again the actual images have no black holes in them… below are 2 shots… one of coverage and another of the 3d model which doesn’t have any black holes either.
I’ve sent this to our support engineering to see if they have ideas of what is happening.
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Hi @Gateway,
Thank you for including the screenshot above- very helpful.
The main thing to consider when mapping forests is that the above ground altitude is relative to the drone’s take off point rather than the trees. This means that if your altitude is 200 feet, but your trees are 100 feet tall (say pines for the sake of an example), then the altitude relative to the trees is 100 feet. This we would consider low (note that our default altitude is about 250 feet or 75 meters).
When mapping trees, it is preferable to set the altitude as high as you can in order to increase the surface area of the images, which in turn gives the software more data to work with. This can help with those small patches you have included an example of above.
Makes sense… why does the 3d model then not have this black holes? Trees where about 80 feet and I was flying at I think around 247 ish… Here is a 360 pano I did of this area… Tahoe 360 Pano