A Second Look At WebODM - Open Source Drone Mapping Software

hey there everybody and welcome to the channel my name is rich Charpentier and as always thanks for stopping by and hanging out for a couple so today I'm I'm revisiting something from almost a year ago now last year I did a short video on web o diem that's open drone map things didn't go so great for me with it but I've had a lot of people get in touch and say hey can you follow up on web o diem I've been busy with client projects and I haven't done enough testing with web odium to date I need to use things that are at the ready for my client job so experimenting with new software and a client job is a bad idea you got to do those experiments outside of it on your own time so recently while I've been working on some other tutorials and other classes and things for patreon and things reviewed of me I said you know I'm gonna take a look at web o diem again because the desktop docker one of these little installation things that helps run it kept getting updates and you know the updates are like seven hundred Meg's upwards to a gig and I had one recently I said you know I'm gonna go play with this because I've got a data set from a class that I'm putting together for you to me so I figured why not use that data set just see what we can and can't do with it quite simply so that data set has 85 images so it's not this huge model and I said let's give it a whack so let's give it a whirl so web ODM is an open source drone mapping application we're looking at their webpage right now so awesome drone software sustainable drone mapping software with a friendly community that's awesome I'm going to go down here and click on web o diem so there's two ways to go at it number one you can download basically the source and compile everything you're gonna you're gonna need to understand some command line stuff for Windows or Mac people because this does run Windows and Mac and Linux so we've got two options here we've got a manual install so it's open-source software if you're a technical user you don't mind getting your hands dirty you're gonna go to github you're gonna get a copy of the source code you're gonna follow the readme I had a couple people comment on last year's video and said hey could you walk us through that no this is this is a this gets a little more time-consuming so if you want it totally free you're gonna have to do some reading and I can't do that reading for you because it's a little involved and yes I have read through it the second option was a web odium installer which is what I went with last year because I said to myself this is the cheapest modeling software I can get my hands on so you're paying for the installation side of it I'm just gonna click on that and web odium installer there's two different ways to go at it you can do the standard in the business they do give you an installation file for Windows or Mac so that's great I mean look at the price fifty seven dollars I've got a lot of you on this channel getting in touch going oh my god Mehta shapes price pics for DS price I I totally get it drone deploy Maps made easy all of these things are costing money if you get a hold of this one you're spending fifty seven dollars if you want to put it on two platforms if you want it Windows and Mac ninety seven dollars that's not bad for the modeling software and I will say at the outset here that I got some decent models this time with that said we're gonna take a look at it what I would suggest maybe if you're getting your start in doing 2d and 3d modeling with drones that this might be a path for you and at that price I don't work for these guys so if that price 57 first angle install or under 100 for two installs that's cheaper than meta shape standard and most anything else out there so if you just want to start getting a gauge of where you're at with your flights for modeling this might be a great way to go alright so scrolling down once again we've got the got the prices their business version has a couple of extra things going on per user license updates included one-year priority installation support note the word installation support it's not the full software it's it's that installer so so we got a couple ways to go you can do the manual install you're gonna be doing a lot of reading you're gonna be downloading some things from github so there's that way if you just want to go the total freebie route but since I did the installer hey some money's going back to this open source development community so that's great before I go any further you know let's do something exciting we always lead off a boring we need some exciting I just pulled up Photoshop and I'm looking at my ortho mosaic that is part of the course that I'm developing on drone construction progression reporting and sites and so this is one of the orthos used for the clients to show them the area show them the major changes in the area this was created with meta shape and what I want to do now is click over we're looking at a completely different image so up here on the left hand side we have web odium TIFF and then we've got four twenty six twenty or thumbless a this is the ortho generated by web o DM looks pretty close to to what I got out of meta shape so not bad as i zoom into it I do see some issues some artifacts some melting edges and I did run this on a very low quality setting with it web odium they actually have a fast ortho mode which we'll see in a few minutes so it could be that if I didn't do it on the fast ortho mode maybe it'd be a little cleaner who knows but to get this output to get this ortho two-dimensional model out this was not bad especially for the price okay I'm gonna minimize this here and we're gonna go back up to the top here so we got the manual install we've got the Installer and you can make your choices if you want them give them a little support and a couple dollars the web odium installer is not horrible what I want to look at next is documentation because this is where things run into some headaches in in my mind at least so we have the official documentation page readme for web DM readme I'm sorry for odium readme for web odium so we've got we've got some documentation the documentation isn't you know super great you're gonna be doing a lot of reading a lot of things that are built open-source and shared through something like github there's a lot of programmers and engineers behind this and they know a little more about the development and their software than you do but sometimes these folks think we're all on the same page as they are and that we can totally understand how these things come together why I wanted to scroll down on this so this is all the github information for web odium there's a lot to read and check out but what I wanted to scroll down to so it's user friendly commercial-grade software for drone image processing yeah it does it does process the images I also tried a 3d with it and it worked ok but we need some more testing with that what I wanted to get down to is getting started they start right away managing processing nodes because you can use the network to process things you can actually you can actually use other people's servers to give you a little more boost over the net sometimes you have to pay for it sometimes you don't one of the things where my files stored so this is just to give you an idea when using docker all the processes are stored in a docker volume there is a program that's running in the background on my computer called desktop docker and this is what helps to launch web odium web ODM is actually a you use a web browser so i'm looking at web ODM now this my install on my computer we're going to talk about it in a couple let's go back here but just take a look at this so I get it you're learning drone work you're learning drone modeling you might be learning about GIS total information overload and then we come in here and we say where am i file stored and hey I'm feeling like the UNIX days I used to run UNIX systems while doing network design and telecom but we've got command line stuff going on you remember remember Doss and our little command prompt and windows and I also have a terminal here on my Mac so that I can do some UNIX command line stuff but you're gonna need to know a couple things you know just even I just wanna know where the files went well hey the files are actually in this docker application and you can you can put them somewhere else and that's a little complex so I'm gonna blow past it because this is just to give you an idea gonna have a little more learning curve so when you're paying for these higher-end applications like let's say just met a shape standard you're paying for a lot of development time you're paying for documentation you're paying for support the prices go up for every part of that now this is kind of your you're waiting way into the deep end of the pool when it comes to setting up programs on your computers and you're gonna have to be a little more knowledgeable or take the time to do some learning so so there we go where my files stored manage plugins updates this is what I wanted to come to recommended machine specs so we are right now on screen here we're using an iMac it's got eight gigs of RAM I wish it was upgradable but hey Apple doesn't like doing that anymore for us let's look at the recommended machine specs because I've had some failures on this thing and so this open-source program might be a little more top-heavy than some of the other programs out there so they're saying a hundred gigs of free disk space that's cool and fine we got external drives and everything they're suggesting sixteen Ram so this machine right here is already psychotically underpowered for this and reading through some issues that people have had and I've had as well it does come down to your processors and the amount of memory that you have so if you've already built let's say a drone mapping computer you might be good maybe you SPECT it out pretty high-end if you haven't here's what I can say to you with my eight gigs of ram on this and the processors that are on my iMac I can do some lightweight work here I cannot run high-resolution stuff it will crash it does crash and I'm going to show you that a minute I also have another Windows box that I've used for mapping it's got 16 gigs of ram it's getting a little dated in when I made the purchase from web odium I did in fact get the installer for Windows as well but I had the same failures and crashes on Windows so having that 16 gigs of ram and the higher end processor still didn't help get me past that all right I'm going to arrow back so there's some rating I do I already see that it's 12 minutes in I do apologize but for those of you who are used to this channel when I do tutorials I try to tell you about everything that I can I think it's really important skipping steps in a process is not going to help you a longer video where we talk about these things usually is more meaningful so my videos go long I'm not going to apologize for that alright I'm closing this so I just want to look at this before we go down any other road so this is a common error that people get when they're running these things and this is what discouraged me last year and why I set web podium to the side so this person was trying to run a model you know so they're on linux and in the end they got this process exited with one this is a generic code which usually means you don't have enough memory all right so going back to the specs for the computers good processors plenty of memory so this person you know reading through there is this whole giant thread there's a couple of things you can do in a couple of things you can change that's great in the meantime though your model failed and it's frustrating you are going to be investing more of your personal time to learn this in depth in comparison to one of the more expensive packages out there there's the reality that's the trade-off so if you want something that's not as expensive you're gonna have to dedicate some of your time to learning more of the intricacies of the program now let's look at the dashboard for web odium so from desktop docker when I launch web ODM it actually brings me into a web browser so pulled up Chrome and last night I wanted to run a test for you so I wanted to run a test on one of my models and I wanted to do at high resolution so this first thing Clark Wayland test number three testing for a live stream I thought I was going to do this video as a live stream I've decided it's easier to do it this way that way I can edit it and so we had a task the task failed project process exited with code one and it's got a sad face over here that's cute thanks for the sad face guys it took one error in 48 minutes of my computer's time to puke and say I can't do this right below that one I did Clark Wayland test number two there's one task and this thing succeeded all right and it succeeded in 50 minutes and 44 seconds I used the default settings on web odium and it actually worked for me so it had some tasks resize the images load the data set structure for motion making meshes making textures geo referencing digital elevation model ortho photo and post-processing anyone who's familiar with my meta shaped class the intro to meta shape probably knows a lot of these terms we do the we do the image alignment we are making our point clouds we're doing meshes textures digital elevation models and orthophotos and what's really cool here so this is something I like I'm gonna click view on map so it's actually showing off there is my ortho model over my construction site there's an opacity slider here so we can slide this way to show you before this project began and if you go look at Google Earth today this is still the map you're gonna see this is the plot of land now I pull that opacity up and hey look there's the construction site that I've been working on so the data set that I have from the construction site that I've been using in meta shape worked out really well and worked with web odium neat really neat this lined up pretty nice but not perfect if you look around this if you hit the pause button you'll notice over here this driveways not really lining up perfectly with the road it's off by a couple feet same things on the other edges what do you expect we didn't do a ground control points here we're not using any kind of survey engineering GPS tools so this is just from the flight this is not bad for an ortho I've had a lot of students on udemy and people on this channel and ask me rich I just want to make an ortho on the cheap web ODM there you go it can be on the extreme cheap let's go ahead and down on the right hand corner I can hit the 3d button boom for our 3d model keep in mind I flew this 90 degrees straight down I was not trying to build a 3d model I was building a 2d model but this is kind of interesting because it definitely has this is the point cloud by the way it definitely has really done a nice job with the structures if you look at the sides nothing that's because I did not fly for getting the facades but so we've got a decent 3d map or model here this is something we could work with so we can download the assets over here on the left so can do an orthophoto we can actually export the point cloud for use in other programs so we've got some tools and if you're starting out and to answer your questions about you need a cheaper way to do it this might be a good practice point for you so this might be the right program now I did a second one down here Clark Whalen testing this one I ran just for the ortho photo and they have a mode to run a fast one and this one worked out as well so I'm gonna hit that view on map again same data set different processing but when we look at this once again it's looking pretty good over in here once again we can see that things aren't lining up perfect but you know we don't need them perfect unless we're you know dealing with measurement and dealing with survey grade accuracy if we're just doing this to present a two-dimensional ortho mosaic of before and afters let's say for my um construction progression reporting work this could get you there so and this is decent enough now when i zoom in cuz like I said I did it on a fast mode we can really see some artifacting and some kind of ice cream melt look at the edge of this roof yeah that's a mess we've got some messy stuff down in here with these sunshade areas so as i zoom in it's not great but I ran it on the fast processing alright let's go back to the dashboard and what I'm gonna show you one more thing I know we're 20 minutes but this is necessary I'm going to add a new project for you so YouTube demo there we go so demo of a web Audion setup we've just created the project here's where the project is in my web browser its YouTube demo and it's got my information let's go select some images trying to be as quick as I can so I'm grabbing the images from a flight I recently executed for a client if you want to see more of this I do have an upcoming course on udemy for drone construction progression reporting and I'll be announcing it here on channel when the class is out it's almost ready I thought it'd be ready for May first but today is May 1st so it'll probably launch next week so I'm picking 84 images out of this flight set and I'm hitting the open button and now this is where web ODM brings us to so this is how we make things get processed not too much information in this screen we can switch to another processing node so if we had a network setup or if we utilize somebody else's network in the cloud we can process this faster and we could do some higher resolution stuff because we're using their computing power so we've got a bunch of options down here so this is the big thing right now you saw that it was checked off at high resolution that's because of the test that I ran for you last night the test that failed if I select default for this image set it works if I select fast orthophoto for this particular image set it works where I get caught is doing the high resolution and it's most likely because I've got 8 gigs of RAM and I could use a faster processor and some more RAM I'm not spending that right now so uh so default and fast ortho have worked well for me they didn't work great for me last year so hey we've got some improvements we've got some other things we can do points interest buildings 3d models volume analysis and we can also select custom I'm gonna go to default here if we go for a custom setup there are a lot of settings in here that you can affect that can change the quality of your model maybe it'll even let you run larger models on a smaller system but all right let's see here PC - classify classify point cloud outputs so using simple morphological filter you can control the behavior of this option by tweaking the dem parameters default is false there are a lot of buttons in here and so s MRF scaler position float you know what it is I mean I can go research find out what this is probably a simple morphological filter elevation scalar parameter default 1.25 okay I'm gonna scroll down in here now because you need to see all of these settings whoa there's a lot of settings there's a lot of settings with things that we might not know about quite yet so if you want to get into higher end modeling and mapping with web odium there is going to be a bigger learning curve it doesn't have the nice clean interface that we've come to be used to with pix 4d with meta shape dealing with drone deploy dealing with map pilot lots of decisions are made for us here we can make a ton of decisions about how we want to fine-tune our model so this is where the bigger learning curve comes in and I was looking at web odium and they do have a 200 something page ebook from someone on this so some of the answers to what all these buttons mean and what you know what are these things because I'm sure you know s MRF window positive float is that a smurf window I don't know we can find out simple morphological filter windows radius parameter why would I want to change this what is this gonna do how is this gonna affect me we need to do some more reading I'm gonna hit the cancel button in the meantime if you are just testing out some simple modeling not doing giant massive models not trying to do super high quality high-resolution this might help you in your first steps into making two-dimensional and three-dimensional models so as I said fast ortho worked really well and pretty darn quickly and default worked pretty well and pretty darn quickly I had a data set with under 100 images going into both of these how big can I go I might test that later on another project that I'm working on and if something interesting comes out of it I'll follow up on this video so what I know for today under images default and fast ortho get me there and they work okay I'm gonna go ahead and hit cancel on this if I were to go ahead if I hit review so there we go review and then I hit start processing it's going to start pulling all of my images in aligning my images and then running through a checklist I'm going to hit this cancel I'm going to hit cancel again and we can go down and look at that bottom one so the checklist that it goes through it resizes the images and uploads them to web podium loads the data set it's gonna make our cloud it's going to do our meshes it's gonna do the textures geo referencing digital elevation model the ortho photo and post-processing running the superfast ortho model one that I showed you took 22 minutes and 40 seconds that's something I really dig web ODMs got it right there because it told me exactly how much time went into this I'm a fan of that alright let's close that task let's look at number two real quick and so task number two I did that with the default settings so didn't go changing any of those crazy buttons there and with the default setting same exact data set same exact image set that was run for the fast ortho now take 50 minutes and 44 seconds of processor time so that first super fast one was a little under 25 minutes the second one is now at 50 minutes and it was a default one there are options for the high resolution ones and things and you saw my high resolution one that was an epic fail process that took one hour and 48 minutes of my computer's time to make the decision that whoa I can't do this I'm Keeling over here I'm not that old of a computer but it's too much so there is a quick overview quick 26 minutes sorry there's a quicker overview of web ODM do I recommend it do I not recommend it here's the thing I just showed you the two ortho models it did a really nice job for me with that ortho model how big of an ortho model can I do before it crashes and gives me a code one I don't know but I think I'm gonna go experiment on one other data set that I have and then do a follow-up next week now I'm interested in getting the book for web odium that 200 something page book and that's available under their documentation and that might really help us fill things in but as a drone pilot and someone who's looking to build their own drone business like you're most probably considering because you're watching this channel reading is involved and all the stuff we're doing you had to learn some new information getting your part 107 you've had to learn about mapping and modeling you've had to learn about drone flight we've got another step in the learning process doesn't mean it's a bad thing and maybe in the end we can get a lot more out of web odm than I've seen so far so maybe you could do some reading too and we could collaborate together here on channel to see how far web ODM could take us and our businesses all right everybody wrapping this one up I hope this was a useful video for you had really liked some feedback on this and I'd really like to know do you think it's worth going down this path digging into this and seeing if we can make something with it finding out if maybe you know in the case of menace shape let's say it processes my models as well it takes a long time sometimes it takes several hours maybe there's a way to tweak things here so that it doesn't have this you know out of RAM kind of code and maybe we can tell it go ahead and take your time we're not in a hurry I don't know that's something I haven't found out in here yet all right if you're interested in this and you don't mind doing things from the command line you can get a hold of this program for free today and start experimenting if you want the Installer and you know the fancier interface and not worrying about command line it's 57 bucks you know if you're a coffee drinker what can I tell you a couple of skips Starbucks will do it for you all right I'll see you guys on the next video sorry this one over but I hope it was informative and I really look forward to hearing back from you to see what you're doing with this because I'm starting to think there's more possibilities here than I thought there were last year all right we'll see ya you

Channel: Rich Charpentier

Views: 12,920

Keywords: Full Time Airstream Living, Full Time RV, Airstream Full Time, Airstream Solar Power, DJI, Mavic Pro, Mavic 2 Pro, DJI Mavic 2 Pro, DJI Mavic, Drone Photography, Drone Video, Drone, 3D Maps, 3D Models, Drone 3D Model, Commercial Drone Pilot, Prescott Arizona, AZ Drone, Arizona Drone, Photography, Airstream, Travel, Drone Real Estate, webodm, web odm, open source drone software, open source drone mapping, open source drone mapping software, open source drone 3d mapping

Id: 7vf8dbdp9ts

Length: 29min 20sec (1760 seconds)

Published: Sat May 02 2020