Drone 3D Models On Google Earth - Modeled With Drone Harmony, Mavic Pro, & Metashape.

so happy Sunday morning everyone and welcome to the channel as always thanks for stopping by and hanging out for a few my name is Richard Charpentier I'm the channel host and normally we do a lot of drone talk here we talked about other things occasionally too but um today I'm answering a question from one of my students from udemy who had a really good question and we haven't really addressed it there or here so the question was a really simple one this person would like to generate 3d models and they want to overlay those 3d models on Google Earth so is that doable absolutely it's doable so that's what we're going to talk about so I'm gonna switch over to the screen here and what you're looking at is a small 3d model of the gazebo that I had done just a couple of weeks ago using drone harmony for the capture application I was doing a demo of drone harmony now this model is not the best the most perfect model in the world this is a model of a gazebo and so the facades didn't come out well and that's mainly my fault because I was focusing more on showing people how the flight works and how drone harmony works then I was interested in the final product so this was an extremely quick flight I did a top-down and I did one orbital so it did a pretty nice job but um the things that got broken you can see you know these aren't closed in walls so there's a lot of shadow going on in there and there's picnic tables and things and you know the modeling application did the best that I could with what I supplied it supplied it with now if I wanted to you know make this a better looking model could I do that absolutely I could do that also in the end I just want to hit the play here so I'm using a G softs Mehta shape for the model rendering so for the final 3d model render I collected all the images with drone harmony I offloaded the images to my computer I loaded them into meta shape and then I had to do its 3d model processing so on meta shape I do have a class 4 introductory metal shape usage so if you're interested in that I'll make sure to put a link down below in the show notes but um in the end you can see yeah that's it's it's an alright model but I didn't spend the time on it that I should have and I didn't really do enough imaging work to begin with so everything starts with your flight if you get things wrong in your flight and you don't get enough images everything else is going to fall apart behind it so that flight planning is extremely important and as I've said on here before there are a ton of flight planning apps like I said I was doing some testing with drone harmony and then there's map pilot and then there's ground station Pro and picks 4d and drone deploy we have a lot of tools and it's up to you whatever your favorite tool is for documenting these things in my case on this one drone harmony test and some of some of the other examples I've used map pilot ground station Pro they're all regularly used here and I have reasons why I use each one in different circumstances I've talked about that in other videos too so so okay we collected our data not the best data in the world and I should have spent some more time there but overall it's still looking pretty nice so once I've created the 3d model that I would like to overlay on to Google Earth so you've seen in other videos and I'm linking above in the show notes and in the info cards where I've overlaid two-dimensional models using geo Tiff's so doing an ortho mosaic over a google map area that was missing information so like new home construction for instance the satellites don't come back to that right away so when you look at a satellite image from Google Earth you go hey that's a big empty area of space no actually there's a bunch of houses there but Google hasn't updated that but you can update that through your drone flight and doing two dimensional models and doing geo Tiff's you can overlay them onto onto Google Earth in this case though we're talking about hey we want to do a 3d model over that area so maybe an area that doesn't have anything showing up but really there's a new home there and it's a really nice new home you want to do a 3d orbit of it or you want to let people see the three dimensionality of that new home that's built there you can do that so in here I have done my modeling workflow so the workflow is going to depend on what 3d modeling software you're using but they all kind of have the same set of steps that they do so you align your photos you build your cloud you build a mesh you build your texture often I jump past building the tiled model then I build my digital elevation model and then I build my ortho mosaic when I've gone through all this I have multiple ways to view the model so over on the left hand side you'll see each of those points we have our cameras our tie points our dense cloud our 3d model our digital elevation model and our ortho and this is meta shape Pro by the way so on the meta shape standard you don't have all these features so you can't do the digital elevation model and you can't do the ortho let me Center this again so now that I've built the 3d model that I'd like to throw on a Google Earth what am I going to do next well it's very simple here with meta shaped Pro and the other modeling software also offers a similar output so when you're investigating modeling software make sure that they give you all the outputs you're looking for before you settle on a vendor and sometimes one vendor does a better job than another vendor when it comes to certain exports but for meta shape when I go up here I can do an export and I can export the model so I am now going to pick a place I'm going to throw it on my desktop and here are all my output options for meditate medicham Pro so we can do two obj dot 3ds VRML models colada usually I use the Stanford Polly's when I'm sending stuff off to sketchfab so there are a lot of outputs for you and in the case of this since we want to deal with Google Earth and we'd like to place this three dimensional model onto Google Earth we've got our KMZ down here so that's the one that we're going with and I'm just going to call this demo 3d GE for Google Earth and I've already run through this this morning I've already tested it out and I made another export to share as well but let's go ahead and do the demo three DGE I'm gonna hit save on that it's going to my desktop I'm not changing any of the export settings that Mehta shape has offered me and I'm gonna say ok to that so there we go it is done I'm going to minimize Mehta shaped Pro and look at that it's right on my desktop demo 3d GE I'm just gonna slide that over to the right get it off screen and let's go ahead and open up Google Earth Pro so Google Earth takes a moment to load up and they always have some kind of interesting information on the front page but there we go so it's rotating to my general area and now up on the Google Earth profile I'm going to tell it to open and what did we name that there's my small structure but what was that one it was demo ok there we go right there so that's the one that we just made together and I'm gonna hit open on this and now it's thrown that into my temporary places over on the left hand side zooming all the way down to Watson link and now we're just waiting for it to finish its job it's actually still spinning over here so it's still processing that exported file so the larger your files the larger the model area the longer this is going to take to come up there we go we just had a little white box in here and now let's do a zoom in and take a look at that it is the 3d model and if i right click and drag around you can see the 3d model you can also see something else really weird and wonky so what's strange well my 3d model is actually floating above the actual ground if you look down here you'll see the edges in here of the 3d model so it's it is overlaying the 3d model on top of Google Earth but it thinks that it's a little higher than it is now this is something that happens if you're not using ground control points in in the case of this flight I was focusing heavily on the flight aspects and utilizing ground harmony I wasn't so worried about my final model output because I wasn't sending this off to anyone you know a client for some kind of reference material but so we do have a 3d model it is floating in space above the Google Earth area and this can be adjusted so number one generating your model you could have used ground control points multiple ground control points with exact GPS measurements and exact elevations I didn't do that here because we were just making a quickie model so what can I fix this a little bit in here right now I sure can over on the left hand side under temporary places right here we have that demo 3d Google Earth I'm going to right click on that and I'm going to go down to get info and on get info we have a couple of things we could reset the latitude and longitude we could actually link it to an external file so I could have output the model dot Dae as well what I'd like to go to on here is altitude so you can see right away that this is 27 meters above the ground area so we definitely got the elevation a little wrong so my drone and my capture methods and the fact that I wasn't using ground control points but in here I can actually have that have that come down a little so from 27 to 21 meters and maybe even 20 meters let's see is that looking ok so now I'm gonna say ok to it and it's still hovering above the ground a little bit and also when you're looking at this you can see that this is not aligning perfectly so we've got this rock wall up here and we can see the rock wall tapering out right in here so this model needs to be moved a little bit as well once the and ground control points would really help resolve these issues but you can go in and do some manual adjustment I'm gonna go back to get info again here and I want to go back to that altitude again so I could drop this down more as I drop it down more we're now seeing the original Google Earth 3d it's only when I start raising this there we go that that 3d model is now there so I can do some adjustments in here with the altitude I can also adjust the latitude and longitude of where this is overlaying right now the better thing to do here would be to get that flight as accurate as possible from the get-go and maybe do a couple ground control points I could see doing four or five ground control points it wouldn't take me too much time and then getting the exact elevation information and latitude and longitude information but if we're not too worried about that I'm going to hit okay we do have this model showing up over the top of the Google Earth area so that is really cool so I'm gonna just pull that back out and zoom that back in so we do we do actually overlay Google Earth it does look a heck of a lot better than the Google Earth's 3d modeling around it now the next part that you're gonna have to play with and make some decisions about is you know if you're just doing this as a sample model do you need to worry heavily about that level of accuracy do you need to introduce the ground control points do you need to introduce lots of extra processing time if that answer is no and you're just showing off a model of where this property or where the structure is going to be in relation to the rest of the planet this might be good enough if this is something where you're worried about accurate measurements and accurate information that might be shared with survey engineers then that flight work up front needs to be done so those ground control points need to be taken care of getting your exact GPS information needs to be taken care of and getting the exact elevation information is really important too it's like like you just saw here I'm just gonna go back down to that get info like you saw here when this thing first imported it set the altitude at 27 I can type today 27 meters and you can see Wow is that floating above but it's floating above the area that it exists and pretty well so you can also like I said see that it's not lining up perfectly so when I go to move this that alignment is not dead-on and those those handicapped parking areas need to come over a little bit but these are things that you can fine-tune afterward or like I said fine-tune before that initial flight if you want it perfect if you're not looking for perfect then you can show off a model like this and that's that's looking pretty cool it gives you an idea of where the gazebo is in relation to the parking area and the rest of the park so there you go that's how you're gonna overlay a 3d model onto Google Earth utilizing in my case drone drone harmony and meta shape now like I said other 3d modeling software offer all sorts of exports before you sign up with one of these groups before you do a monthly or yearly payment or before you heavily invest make sure the outputs that are generated from the modeling software you picked match all the outputs that you're going to need to provide to your clients all right so a nice and quick one today a very short tutorial but hopefully this gives you a good idea hey yeah I can make 3d model and throw it on Google Earth now where does this come in super handy well in the Prescott area right now we've got a lot of new construction going on you've seen some of that on this channel and on some of my classes where I've shown some of the areas that are being built out this could be really helpful for documenting new homes so in areas where Google Earth doesn't have any kind of coverage or anything yet you can actually go through generate these 3d overlay the 3d models on Google Earth and actually let people get a full 360 view around these new home construction sites maybe for their own planning as to whether or not they'd like to purchase their so there you go all right everyone I'm gonna hop off and get to editing this and there might be another video coming out of here today too I had to answer this question so Bob I hope that this answered your question well and when I can actually directly answer questions of the video I'm gonna try to do that more often here for everybody all right folks have an awesome rest of the day and we'll see you again really soon you

Channel: Rich Charpentier

Views: 2,655

Rating: 4.830986 out of 5

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

Id: A7igpsbZyQY

Length: 16min 30sec (990 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 22 2020