3D Mapping - Intro to Drone Deploy | Flite Test

hi welcome to flitetest I'm Austin this is Josh hi and today we're going to be talking about 3d mapping so what are the basic things you need to do to set this up so the system that I'm using is called drone deploy and they basically are a company that is trying to make it really easy to get topographical data and to do 3d modeling and something new that they're trying instead of the DJI Go app you download the drone deploy app and it's free still isn't it is free to use yep you're flying off of the drone deploy app instead of the DJI app and you actually have to close the DJI app because only one app can talk at a time to the drone to the fan as soon as you open the app it opens up a grid so it senses where you are and it basically makes a flight path for determining how many photos it's going to take and what order it's going to take them and you can adjust it by selecting these points you can actually kind of fine-tune the area that you want on so it has has geofencing now what about the overlap and everything is that predetermined for you yeah that's something that I didn't know yesterday when I was first trying it that's all stuff you can edit so you can edit the altitude that you want to have it run at while it's doing its grid one thing that I found is that the lower it is the more resolution you're going to get but the higher it is the easier it is for the software to stitch because it has more reference points or how to actually stitch together and obviously the more information it has the more I can do with it correct yeah and so you can fight that by increasing the overlap so actually I think for this one I'm running the overlap at like 75 80 percent okay and that's that's a lot of overlap but it's how you get the most accurate data okay very cool so basically we're just going to hit the screen check mark here and it's going to do some automatic checking for us yeah that's kind of nice it all preflight check that it really is it's pre-flight checklist and it does it all for you and we're good to go now now the creepiest thing in the world is the phantoms over here we're here we're not even facing it this thing's gonna be completely autonomous you can't override it if you need to though yes it was the scariest flight I've ever had it was doing all itself yesterday and I had like a death grip on the controller but now it's it's getting a lot more natural so you just hit the fly button when you're ready and there goes a thing definitely doesn't waste any time does it no it is not and the default altitude to run a mission is 246 feet and I have it set a little bit lower I have it set at 150 feet for this mission again I'm trying to we're trying to do a structural 3d model of this property and so I think that more resolution is more helpful when you're trying to do a 3d model structural is a newer thing a newer feature right yeah actually the structural feature is just in beta the structural feature would be for stuff like if you want to like get a 3d model of a statue or like a monument or a building this is definitely a fun thing to play with now you got a predetermined course what I love is it's giving you a live feed of what it's seeing it's also giving you the indication of when it's shooting yep and you can also monitor where it is on the grid and it's really staying on that grid yeah and I noticed you can't really edit the speed of how of how fast it flies but as what it is what you do is is you edit by editing the altitude that determines the speed I noticed that when I was at the default height of 246 feet it was going about 20-25 miles an hour and now that I'm down a lot closer to the ground is having to take pictures faster because it's close to the ground right now it's going about 12 miles an hour nice so I'm hoping that we're going to get some really high resolution data to play with because we've gotten some decent models but I just I think we can do better you've been trying this since yesterday you've been doing all sorts of combinations with Heights altitudes number of photos trying to get something that will return around the quickest for you and give you the best quality right yeah I'm sure that people that are more experienced with messing with this when they get to a place they already kind of know what settings are going to use I just Umbria to it so I'm just kind of figuring it out and just seeing I changed something and I go for a flight and unfortunately you kind of mentioned it's kind of like baking cookies because you it does take a couple hours to process yeah so after we do this we'll go get the SD card and then on my drone deploy account online it'll have an upload option to upload all the photos so I'll upload all those and then it takes while they're stitching them and getting them together through their process it does take a couple of hours enough time for us to have lunch all right so we're back from lunch and we got some results for y'all yeah we actually we try to quite a few more times yeah just to experiment and do some different things and we definitely learned a lot yes yeah if you're going to notice here that the footage that you've seen right now it looks really good in some aspects but really bad in others doesn't it yeah and to be fair into the 3d modeling is new it is a beta feature for drone deploy it does terrain really well but we did find some tricks and the drone deploy support team did help us find some tricks to actually really increase the resolution in the quality of those models increase doesn't even begin to justify it it's amazing the first thing that we learned is overlap so overlap is extremely important the very very first model I did just here at the shop it was like 8 photos he goes like maybe 40% lower overlapped or less so I started doing like 80 percent overlap and for a small area that's okay it doesn't really take that long to do about 10 acres or so even with 80 percent overlap that's also front and side overlap so that's actually taking pictures sooner going forwards and it's overlapping the more on the side next thing that I really learned was altitude altitude makes a big difference the lower you are the higher resolution you're going to get and then the higher you are the easier it is to stitch but you're not going to have that high resolution you're you're dispersing those pixels over a bigger part of space so really if you're looking for a big picture of something high is good but if you're looking at something like a house or a property or silo you're gonna want to be lower loaded seemed to work better for me yeah so the big tip that we got from drone deploy support was for 3d mapping it is actually really important to get some more side perspective of any kind of vertical structure that you're trying to film such as like a building or statue or whatever you're trying to get in a 3d environment so is how we did that is we actually exited out of the drone deploy app and just pulled up the regular DJI Go app and through that there's some automated flight modes that DJI has and one of them is point of interest and so with the point of interest mode we were actually able to orbit at a 45 degree angle around the same altitude that we flew the original mission and then we were able to get a side view of all those buildings so we actually the three buildings that we were trying we did we orbited all three of those and the results were drastically different now this is a really cool thing even though we're exiting out of one function and going back in the DJI app it all works within that other app doesn't it it doesn't change your upload at all so you basically just combine the photos of everything that you're going to upload and you upload it all together and because the information or those JPEGs are geotagged drone deploy servers are able to parse the differences and able to stitch them together in a way that makes sense now keep in mind it's gonna be about 60 seconds per picture so if you have a thousand pictures it's about a thousand minutes yep yep absolutely and actually I think a thousand is the limit the amount of pictures you're able to do at once so you can actually use any kind of aerial photo that as long as it's geo reference to jpg to upload it to drone deploy but one thing the drone deploy app does really nicely is it flies the machine for you and so it takes it off and it flies a pattern and it lands on its own there's really fascinating I don't normally get to see things flying a geomap pattern this thing was really disciplined the only thing it was causing to drift a little bit was the wind and you could see that on the corners and it was so accurate you could actually see it drift on every corner that all the same way like it was constantly getting pushed but immediately correct it and even when it came down to land there's only five feet from his original takeoff spot part of the reason we wanted to do this this is actually a small-scale test for what we want to do with flight fest so fly fest is our big event that's coming up here in July and we want to be able to capture the whole event and that way we can kind of compare layout from previous years and see exactly where everything was which you can kind of do with a photo but with a 3d model is really cool so friends I know 3d mapping may be very intimidating especially if you have a phantom don't hesitate to check this out now if you go to our articles on flight test comm slash articles or check out the links below you're going to see all the resource links we use and a link to our article that'll give you a lot more information about this and if you haven't checked out the link for flight fest 2016 go to flight fest comm we'd love to see you there see you guys next time

Channel: FliteTest

Views: 578,603

Rating: 4.9229589 out of 5

Keywords: drone deploy app test, dji phantom 4 review, 3d mapping with a dji phantom, 3d mapping review, how to use drone deploy app

Id: q3wXggCqY_8

Length: 8min 50sec (530 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 14 2016