How to do Drone Mapping | Best Mapping Drones & Software

hey everyone you should know how to create 2D maps and 3D models from [Music] drones welcome my name is Paul and this is drone HQ I hope that you get a lot of information about this video and what are we going to go over we're going to go over what is the workflow of mapping what do you need to know and what do you need to understand because there's so many videos out there that just make it look like as drone Pilots we are battery babysitters by clicking go and letting drone deploy do its thing unfortunately that ideology might get more people in trouble than it does actually solve problems so I hope that you realize this video is taught from experience we're going to be going over what it takes to actually create 2D Maps 3D models we're going to go over deliverables and we're going to go over different drones to get the job done we're also going to go over which drones are capable that are Chinese and which that are domestically approved cuz there are a lot of options out there for you today look let's be honest let's be real technical drone deliverables are going to pay better but there are a lot of things and take it from me I have learned the hard way I've learned what I didn't know and what I didn't know that I didn't know about drone mapping so when we talk about drone mapping what are we talking about we're talking about photogrammetry just think of it as the science of using trigonometry to measure distances in imagery it's actually been around since about 186 7 and yes like many other modern inventions it was invented out of the necessity for war yes I know woof anyway let's get into the nitty-gritty of drone mapping when you think of drone mapping think of measuring from images but in order to actually create beautiful drone maps and models you have to know about map quality okay the quality of your map is going to be determined on three factors the size of the Imaging sensor or camera sensor the altitude that you fly and the focal length of the camera whenever you look at a map's quality a lot of people look at camera quality and how many megapixels that's not always true because you need to determine the true size of the camera sensor when it comes to drone mapping we measure map quality in ground sampling distance okay and that's those three factors I just mentioned which is camera size focal length and the altitude that you fly so the higher that you fly the lower quality map that you have because the higher that you fly you might have like a 2in or a 3in ground sampling distance when we talk about ground sampling distance literally imagine two pixels adjacent to one another and we are taking a measurement from the center point of those two pixels and measuring between them and essentially normalize for real world dimensions and that is our actual ground sampling distance now I will say the old mapping Powerhouse used to be the Phantom 4 Pro a version two I would argue that it still is in most cases but now the mavic 3 Enterprise has become the new mapping standard when it comes to creating drone maps and models what you'll find is that this drone has a 1in sensor which if you fly about let's say 20 acres might take about 11 or 12 minutes with this this is a Micro 4 third sensor flying at the exact same altitude the mission will only take about 6 minutes although one of the biggest mistakes that new drone mappers make is once they start to run a mission in DJI pilot 2 they forget to click dewarping on before they start running the mission there's your first tip and trick for drone mapping so typically when we are doing drone mapping our drone needs to fly in a very autonomous method and the reason that we have to fly an autonomous method is that in order to recreate scenes and environments or create those digital twins we have to have a very high level of overlap in our imagery the reason that we need to do that is very simple it's the same fallacy that we have as humans what is that well we only have two eyes right so if I'm looking at the camera or you're looking at that camera and you're looking at me the position that I seem to be can change depending on the perspective that I'm essentially speaking from so again that perspective can change depending upon where I'm standing where the camera is looking we essentially call this Parallax which is the object that you're looking at can look like it's in a different place depending on where you're looking from now because we only have two eyes we can't measure distances very well so think about this how far away just look take your nearest wall right you're watching this video on a computer look at the nearest wall how far away is that wall it doesn't matter your answer cuz I can prove the point right here okay let's say that that wall you're looking at maybe it's 8 ft away away well maybe the Wall's 20 ft away maybe the Wall's 14 ft away how far away is the wall for you now notice how you answered the question you probably answered the question in whole numbers meaning 12T 14t 16 ft 20t 22t 23 ft okay that showcases what we call your ellipsoid error or your incapacity to accurately measure distances with just two points of view okay that wall let's say that your wall is approximately 8 ft away but you didn't answer the question in 7' 8 in and 3/8 why you only have two eyes this is why we need such a high level of overlap when we're flying these single Grid or double grid missions to create these 2D maps and 3D models so why do we have these high levels of overlap because of what we call Parallax which means we need a lot of photos to recreate an area typically if you ever fly a mapping Mission you're going to have have an acquisition plan this acquisition plan is going to show you the mapping area that you need to fly be careful because the different processing engines and different softwares some will call this a mapping area some people will call it a processing area the difference is very real you can learn more about that in my comprehensive mapping course because I don't have 32 hours to explain this all to you okay moving on now whenever you fly those missions it's typically going to ask you do you want to fly a 7575 7580 what do you want to fly they're talking about the over AP because whenever you fly these missions you're going to need a frontal overlap and you're going to need a side overlap typically the gold standard whenever you're recreating a digital scene is going to be a 7575 overlap but that only that only takes us about halfway into our acquisition plan because we also have to Factor on the gimbal tilt okay the gimbal tilt angle here's a perfect example we have our Phantom 4 okay now if I'm flying a mission and my camera is at nater no bill English it is not ner we are not French I hope you watch this video and get a laugh out of that okay with nater imagery our camera is Plumb to the ground if we want to create the most accurate Ortho mosaics we want to have that nater camera orientation that's going to provide us with the best bare Earth model possible it's going to reduce much of the Distortion and create the most accurate representation of what's on the ground but we still haven't even talked about accuracies cuz there's two types of accuracy absolute accuracy meaning you know your building is in the real world and how close to the real world does it actually show up then there's relative accuracy meaning let's say I'm creating a map of this Phantom and I know that from motor Center to motor Center is 950 mm and I measure it in my map and it comes up of 949 then I know I have a high degree of relative accuracy okay so whenever you're flying mapping missions it's going to be an acquisition pattern typically 7575 overlap to cover the front and side lap you're also going to have that gimbal tilt angle most orthomosaic based missions it's going to require a nater camera orientation but if you want to create better 3D models and you want to see more of the facades of walls then typically you're going to have a gimbal offset typically 70° now DJ calls it negative 70° because they like confusing you and making you learn new things as to reduce the amount of competition that you truly have great job DJI so when it comes to creating 2D maps from drones we have to fly an autonomous Mission we have to essentially pick our altitude based off of the quality of the map that we want to have and what I want to get into next is that there's really three types of mapping software these get confused all the time I don't want you to get confused okay number one type of mapping software is acquisition software this is the software that controls the Drone to fly those perfectly straight lines to make sure that you get enough data to accurately reconstruct the environment that you are flying to make sure it's got the right location the right orientation and the right scale okay but it's also important to know that you can only map what you can see it's not what you can see it's what the Drone can see okay so if we're mapping this room we would want to make sure that we have say at least five images of every single corner to make sure that it shows up in our map the acquisition software that we use is going to help us do that but it's not always sufficient with these older Phantom 4 pro version 2os there was a huge amount of third-party softwares that would help you create really beautiful lifelike 3D models and really beautiful 2D uh accurate Maps but since since DJI has moved away away from supporting the very people that made their drones popular and now supporting only DJI pilot 2 you'll find we have a a don't crash course on the mavic 3 Enterprise and I go over how to hack this drone to literally get the best mapping missions possible because the oblique mission is a joke um and we show you some hacks to just take a single grid and essentially duplicate that mission change the course angle 90° set a custom tilt angle and that way you don't waste a bunch of time out in the field with dji's lackluster piloting and autonomous software so we went from having a software suite where we could choose whatever acquisition app that we wanted to essentially being stuck to a few limited options with the mavic 3 Enterprise I know other YouTubers came out of the gates firing of how great this is a mapping drone when it first came out and if you would have installed any of those apps on your drones you would have learned the hard way way that you would have bricked your drone uh we installed drone deploy a couple months after this came out and it bricked our drone now it works fine same thing with pix4d capture Pro so we've kind of gone from this environment of lots of choices and options to limited choices that's okay but when it comes to software we're talking about acquisition apps the next type of software that you should be aware of is called desktop processing software this is going to be software like pix 40 capture Bentley's context capture those are software program that work on a powerful desktop machine you need a really Hefty computer high-grade GPU to actually crunch lots of photos thousands of photos to create lifik models and 2D Maps now the benefit of desktop processing software number one you can control how your data is processed number two you can manipulate the data you can delete points you can rearrange points you can categorize and classify points you have a lot more flexibility to create more more complex 3D models and um better 2D Maps the last type of acquisition software that we're going to talk about is cloud-based software this is like it's also an all-in-one I'll call it an all-in-one cloud-based software in all honesty this is your drone deploy okay this is your propeller Arrow there's a lot of options out there measure another option and measures flight management is really great but it's important to understand that there's acquisition apps processing apps Cloud apps Cloud apps are typically the way that most drone Pilots go if you watch just about any other drone mapping video on YouTube everyone's going to be talking about drone deploy they just make it so easy or measure or any other cloud-based software now cloud-based software is great because you have one Central Hub to manage your data Cloud software is great because it makes it easier to share data with your clients Cloud software sucks because you cannot control how your data is processed you have limited means if any means at at all of manipulating and editing your data and if your data is broken and it doesn't work well guess what you're screwed battery babysitting didn't pay off or those YouTube videos didn't pay off either which is why it's so important to understand a couple of things we teach a comprehensive mapping course here at dronu and we teach primarily on pix 4D mapper we also teach on drone deploy we also teach on pix 4D react we also teach on something called optos now we'll be moving into other softwares here recently too like uh capture reality but what's important to know is the reason that we teach on pix 4D mapper is because you can create the largest amount of deliverables possible and work through that workflow so that you understand the steps of photogrammetry it is not just flying your drone in a nice simple pattern to create this nice you know reconstruction typically you have to make sure that your map is accurate the way that we do that is typically we utilize some sort of Ground Control Point these are like Targets on the ground and these Targets on the ground typically have two unique parts to them one is a target that can be seen from the Drone so it makes it easy to mark that position in your map to Geo reference your map or give it an absolute accuracy okay the second part is the actual GPS unit now there's two types of units that are very common one is an rtk Rover much like the reach rs2 we prefer the Trimble da2 as it comes in in under $500 and it costs about $11 per mapping job to actually process those rtk points but to keep this short you're going to need cellular service you're going to need a pretty close proximity to what we call Coors Tower continually operating Reference Station and you're also going to need access to what we call vrs or a virtual Reference Station now rtk works great and that you get your points right away but a more common Simple Solution are these propeller Arrow points I would like to demonstrate just how difficult these are to use because honestly it does take a little bit of rocket science to be able to understand how these work to take your map which you might think is at 5,000 ft but actually it's at 4889 that's what these are going to do so let me demonstrate the difficulty in using these okay it's on I know very hard we let these lay out in the ground for about 45 minutes and they collect data and then that data is magically sent up to the cloud it's corrected at Opus and then we get that corrected data and we take our drone map and we tie our ground control points in and typically you'll find that your map is going to move a significant distance and elevation this is how we create accurate Maps okay I've really gone down the rabbit hole on GPS and again I'm trying to whittle a 32-hour class down into 20 minutes and I'm not doing a good job so let's talk about the best drones for drone mapping when it comes to DJI if you can fly Chinese drones which they are superior aircraft the mavic 3 Enterprise is the way to go you will be mapping with DJI pilot 2 you can use things like drone deploy that all-in-one software you can download the APK file from the Google Play or Amazon store load it on there do all that you don't have to do that you can just use DJI pilot 2 you don't have to buy software to actually create these maps and models the old Legacy drone that was the PowerHouse was the Phantom 4 pro version 2 now if you cannot fly DJI then I am going to argue that the best mapping drone made by domestic manufacturers that is available today and that makes drone mapping missions a lot more efficient is going to be the free fly Astro drone that drone can carry a 60 megapixel Sony camera which means you don't have to fly as high and you get jobs done a lot faster now the freefly Astro has great acquisition software built right into the Drone and it has a significant flight time unlike other domestic competitors like the Sony air Peak the parrot anafi is another great solution if you need to go domestic anafi AI it's just that you're working with a linear rolling shutter and so you're not going to get the most accurate results and as I proved on Instagram I actually compared a parrot anafi AI to the Phantom the Phantom took to process an ortho in pix 40 mapper took 36 minutes with 100 photos parrot anafi AI took two and a half hours because that linear rolling shutter it's just not that efficient great drone though if you can't afford a free fly Astro now a lot of people ask me Paul I want to map large areas what's the best way to do that I would like to introduce the wing inra 1 Gen 2 this is a fixed Wing mapping drone that has vertical takeoff and Landing it also carries Sony's smallest full-frame sensor and can carry other multispectral sensors as well the beauty of the wingtra 1 Gen 2 is that wingtra has its own PPK based GPS PPK is postprocessed kinematic GPS it's exactly what the arrow points are as post processed you don't need a live Cellular Connection you can do this out in the boonies or rural areas and wingtra has really nailed fast efficient accurate mapping because to map 400 Acres with a phantom would take about 8 to 9 hours to do it with a mavic 3 Enterprise would take about 5 or 6 hours to do 400 Acres with a Wingra 1 and have a highly accurate imagery through wingtra 1's Hub it's going to take about 47 minutes so as you can see it's an efficiency of scale it's just that let's be honest Wingra the 3D data is not nearly as good as the 2D data and that's only because those cameras fly at a fixed position they're at that nater tilt they can't tilt up to get that good facade or wall data let's talk about common deliverables and then we're going to go into different um drone mapping deliverables based on industry so number one is the orthomosaic this is your traditional 2D map a lot of you have seen orthomosaics on Google Maps and this brings up the question Paul why don't I just use Google Earth Pro to create really detailed accurate 2D Maps well thanks to the Department of Defense those Maps can only have a quality of 25 cm of ground sampling distance if 1 cm equals 2.54 in then you can see that's about a foot and a half error so if you want to take measurements plus or minus 3 ft well good luck to you sir I wish you the best of luck now with drone maps and models we can literally get down to an inch maybe even less depending on the circumstances but it's important to understand that you're never going to get that level of accuracy with just a drone you will need some sort of ground control points to tie that map down to actually make it as accurate as possible the next deliverable that we'll talk about is a point Cloud now a point cloud is essentially when the software has identified unique points in multiple photos Okay so let's say that we are mapping this desk and we have flown a single grid over it and we see this knot in this wood and we see it in three or four Images the software is going to say hey I know that that knot of wood is unique based off of its contrast white balance and a couple other features what I'm going to do is I'm going to take these multiple uh points from various photos and I'm going to create those 2D points into a 3D point every 3D point or Point cloud has typically four data points to it x y z and color X is going to be like uh essentially X and Y are like your laterals your longitude your latitude and then Z or Zed as our famous Canadian friends like to say is essentially going to be your elevation okay okay so Point clouds are great because that's going to be a digital twin or a digital representation of the environment that you're trying to map don't confuse a point cloud with a 3D textured mesh now you're going to understand why we have this new cool backdrop this new cool backdrop is a subconscious methodology of showcasing to you that we really love data this is actually a perfect rendition of a 3D textured mesh because a 3D textured mesh is going to essentially draw triangles okay here's a triangle triangle triangle triangle triangle it's going to draw triangles between all these points and then it's going to use the adjacent Point color to fill in the gaps between the points the 3D textured mesh that's our lifelike 3D model that's essentially what we can show to our clients what we can upload to Google poly to sketch Fab to Kola and showcase our really cool life like 3D models digital surface model this is an important one to understand a digital surface model is going to be essentially a 2d map that every point is going to Showcase a point of elevation with a digital surface model things like homes trees and other man-made objects are going to show up in the digital surface model which makes it different from a digital terrain model a digital terrain model is essentially like a bare Earth model where we remove trees we remove houses we remove all this other stuff to create a very accurate bare Earth model now if you've seen that really cool video from Indiana drones which what a cool name um you'll see that he actually said he made $45,000 in a day creating a toppo from a digital terrain model made from lidar which brings up an important question when would you use lidar versus using photogrammetry photogr is a passive technology okay we're not shooting laser beams okay to uh actually measure distances we are capturing photos and measuring objects from those photos based off of the tilt of our camera the position of our camera and the elevation of our camera and many other factors with lar it's an active technology so it is shooting laser beams down to the ground now typically it's shooting thousands of lasers all all the time okay shot shot shot shot shot you're going to get lots of returns to the camera that say Hey this is actually how far away this thing is it's typically the fourth fifth and sixth return that penetrates vegetation which means that if you live in a densely vegetated area AKA anywhere on the East Coast then photogrametry may not always be the best option for you because it cannot penetrate vegetation whereas lar can lar is going to penetrate to the ground you can remove all the trees and create a beautiful digital Terrain model to create a topographical map like the maps you see on all Trails for hiking and whatnot so you can get a basic understanding of terrain and whatnot all right we've talked about different softwares we've talked about deliverables we've talked about drones we've talked about how we can create these different things let's talk about the best mapping softwares okay if you want to create the most accurate 2D maps and if you want to create the most deliverables meaning an ortho DSM DTM you know linear measurements you want to do a video animation tool you want to create cool hyperlapses of areas like this one here guess what that's going to be pix 4D mapper that is a desktop based processing solution the cool thing about pix 4D mapper and I don't think this has ever like made it out in any of my previous podcasts is you can actually set up how you want the map or model to be processed and then send it up to pix 4's cloud and they will process it for you which is a super hack because then you get the best of both worlds between cloud and desktop based processing now let's talk about the best online cloudbased photog gometric engine drone deploy Mike you won my heart at the FAA Symposium and you guys have done incredible jobs of creating beautiful maps and models it's important to note with drone deploy it is a cloud-based service so you have very limited control on how your data is processed but thanks to some machine learning they've been able to actually identify different types of acquisition strategies and they've been able to essentially get you the best deliverable from those it's not always the best and honestly though most of the time it's very good because you can easily organize all of your data deliverables you can also easily send out those data deliverables as well now drone deploy is the very best photog gometric software for doing volumetric measurements so if you've got a quarry that you like to visit once a week for a nice handy thousand bucks and you're going to actually measure the different piles and whatnot with drone deploy you can actually set the material density because we know that rock is a different density that sand which is a different density than like sub agregate sand which is a different density than just the dirt in your backyard or the compost that you literally put over your grass to get a nice lush green backyard drone deploy the best for volumetric measurements also drone deploy has done a very good job of incorporating different types of media into their maps and models things like 360 images from above but also incorporating things like struction site which is essentially like a matterport for interior 3D models as well okay let's talk about the very best orthomosaic software in my humble opinion it is pix 4D react here's why a lot of people know drone mapping for construction and drone mapping is used in construction a lot but if you want to crush the competition and go steal the jobs from under them right away it's very easy and simple why most construction sites they use uh drone deployed measure some use pix 4D okay what you can do is you can fly a single grid nater camera orientation cuz pix 40 react only works with single grid nater camera orientation and you can actually before you leave the site create a 2d orthomosaic map and give it to the client most of the construction guys that I know bless your heart I love you all they deliver within 24 to 48 hours with pix 40 react you can fly in about 10 to 30 minutes and you can produce your output in about 10 I've never gone over 15 minutes so 10 to 15 minutes with pix 40 react also it does not require internet which is why I recommended it over uh drone deploy because drone deploy orth mosaics in all honesty if you have internet access drone deploy creates much more accurate 2D Ortho mosaics something that's important to note no matter what software that you use is you cannot determine true accuracy within said software okay so if I'm in drone deploy I'm in pix 40 I'm in capture reality reality capture whatever name they choose um and it's going to tell you an RMS error or root mean square error essentially how far off from known points or how far off is your map from The Real World position that it's in pix 40 often times will be like .1 and that's really really good but you're not really going to be able to discern true accuracy unless you put that map and model into another software like um virtual mapper Global mapper uh ezr service arcgis qgis and that's going to give you an actual accuracy but it's important as drone Pilots unless you have a surveying license you really should never tell your clients what accuracy it is if if they want to know hand them the quality report from whatever software that you're using and say you can determine the accuracy on your own but here's all the data that you're going to need and here's the GPS equipment that I use in order to gather that accuracy this particular subject has gotten a lot of pilots in trouble myself included and so it's very important to understand what you are talking about geospacial intelligence geospatial Sciences is a very very complex thing if you can't answer questions like like should I use the orthometric height or the geid 12b height or just the regular um wgs84 height chances are probably shouldn't be mapping the good news is you can learn all this stuff it's actually very valuable to have that information and uh that knowledge and whatnot so going back to software is if you want to make the most lifelike beautiful 3D models then you got to check out capture reality or reality capture whichever name they choose it is also a pay per token service so you don't actually need to pay for the service to create maps and models you only have to pay for it if you export your data deliverables so what's the best software for complex infrastructure things like little small power lines power substations cell phone towers cuz there really is no Zillow of cell phone towers those coverage maps that you get from your cellular carrier those are guesstimates those are not accurate whatsoever but thanks to companies like opt pillos who are creating exactly that just an widespread essential map of all the cell phone towers in the entire country and in all honesty they use uh Bentley's context capture engine so for a very reduced price you can get access to Bentley's engine and as you'll see here if we look at a cell phone tower that's L literally right here if you look at the pix4d version versus the optos version you're going to understand very very quickly why optos is superior that 3D textured mesh is just so much better understanding geotagging of assets is so much better being able to read barcodes on those big antennas so much better it's honestly not even comparable there is piig 4D inspect but it's not something that I can sit here and honestly recommend to you optos is Superior in just about every way that's essentially a very wide gamut of the different photog gometric softwares that you can use to create drone maps and drone models a lot of this information may sound daunting it's not just you're going to have to practice the workflow the workflow of drone mapping is simple go out find your site survey your site make sure your airspace is good measure your mocha if you don't know what mocha is take the comprehensive mapping class once you measure mocha and you set up your mission your acquisition plan how high am I going to fly what area am I going to fly what camera tilt am I going to fly I'm going to set the white balance and if I'm flying a mavic 3 Enterprise I'm not going to forget that the camera is in manual focus focus and that I need to turn dewarping on all the things you learn here drone you once we have that acquisition plan we actually fly and then we take our photos we typically um organize those photos that's one of the massive benefits of the mavic 3 Enterprise is that you get a new folder every single time you create a map and Mission which is awesome so once you get those photos you process those photos you can process them on a desktop or a cloud service then you interpret that data and then you send it to the client in a gist that is the workflow of drone mapping so let's talk about why this is so valuable for clients and companies first of all I hope that you understand this class is taught from experience with this level of complexity you are going to need to learn things that are very applicable otherwise you're going to go to these $40,000 mapping classes at a traditional university only to realize that the professor hasn't done that many maps and really doesn't understand the intricacies of going from one area to the next to the next to get these mapping missions done now when mapping missions pay a lot more than just shooting photos and videos You'll quickly understand why everyone wants to get into drone mapping it's a set of guidelines it's not subjective there's very clear-cut guidelines on map quality accuracies what type of accuracies and yeah it's a lot of information but it's extremely valuable to be able to get this digital twin of Any Given site so let's talk about the different Industries and why drone data especially drone mapping is so valuable to them let's talk about construction mapping look construction projects need to stay on time if I pay a concrete contractor to pour 2,000 cubic yards of concrete every single day for a total of 50,000 yards every single day we can fly that area and actually measure how much concrete was poured on any given day if we find that only 1560 cubic yards were poured on any given day that means our project is not going to be on time for any construction client that could equate to anywhere from $10,000 to a million per day in delayed regulatory costs labor costs OSHA compliance costs and we just go down the line so we can also audit materials this is something that we did for a construction company that we trained we essentially found out that one of their uh aggregate providers was actually skimming off the top of every single truck when we measured how much material they had versus how much they ordered they realized that our $3,500 mapping job had just paid for itself twofold construction projects can also be used for marketing I love creating complex 3D models and the Colorado Convention Center was by far the hardest 3D model that I've ever created and I tried every single mapping engine to create the 3D model and the only one that I could get to work was pix 40 mapper because I had to create almost 26 manual tie points around the entire building marking about 30 photos in each MTP to get everything to stitch align and merge together now what did that turn into it turned into this beautiful animation which as you'll see this was the animation utilized to essentially showcase how the renovation of the Colorado Convention Center would be done which if you go down there right now you can literally see this animation in real life it's pretty cool but that said basic construction deliverables are going to be 2D Maps progression photos and orbital video highgrade construction clients are going to pay thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars to recreate environments and then do animation over those environments to acquire the next big job so let's also talk about telecommunications because this is a big one cell phone tower mapping it's one of our newest classes at dronu if you haven't checked it out it's worth it because right now uh the companies that we work for are hiring and pay anywhere from $250 Tower up to $840 a tower it does take some time to learn how to map those Towers uh accurately and adequately but that said it's one of the best scalable jobs and the beauty of it is is you typically do not have to process the data but it is absolutely critical to know the relationship of data acquisition and data processing because crap data in equals crap data out it's like eating Taco Bell everyone always gets the same thing diarrhea all right so moving forward when we talk about telecommunications we really need to know and index what antennas are on what towers to be able to discern and cover bandwidth that we need for those cell phone carriers to service their clients AKA when it comes to power utilities look we've seen the fires in Paradise California All Over California we've seen them in Hawaii we've seen them all over the country because our infrastructure is aging and yet we're pushing you know electric vehicles we're pushing all these new electric things and our grid literally can't handle it so in this new infrastructure bill it's all about building the grid of the Future Part of the infrastructure bill is indexing all these assets which needs to be done some of our largest clients are power utilities and we are actively training Pilots right now to do substation inspections substation mapping transmission and distribution mapping transmission and distribution inspections honestly there is a tiered job flow just like any other corporate job there's going to be the new guys who do basic stuff to the advanced guys that do the advanced stuff and all honestly the advanced stuff keeps you on your toes keeps you challenged and is a lot more fun and a lot more lucrative other Industries my favorite one that I'm going to go over because I want to keep this video uh clear and concise cuz we're going to do another video about 3D modeling but my favorite absolute favorite drone jobs were creating 3D models for films like uh Netflix is um the harder they fall and creating digital twins of that little Ghost Town that's out in Santa Fe New Mexico where they actually utilize that for three different departments The Scouting Department okay the DP the Director of Photography but also in the VFX department where they could take those digital Twins and recreate every single thing that they wanted to in order to recreate that scene if I were you and I live in California which I don't so go for it or you live in these different areas it's always a really good idea to go out and map event centers and map filming locations because you can create that map and 3D model just one time and sell it to multiple clients because they're all going to need to take measurements for uh navigation Logistics moving Assets in moving assets out people in people out and remote administration of any particular event even Emergency Management so in all honesty that's going to be a 3D kind of model so you're going to be doing double grids and orbits you're not really going to be doing single grids but when it comes to drone mapping and modeling just know that this is the ultimate level of data and data is Black Gold most people don't know what to do with data it's the people that understand predictive versus prescriptive data analysis and they can turn these data points into suggestions on how to solve problems in businesses my point in saying this is that many of us don't really understand the value of data as soon as you realize what problems can be be solved from drone data you'll realize that the amount of jobs that are out there for drone mapping is almost Limitless the jobs of the future are going to be with drone Pilots you might be flying Phantoms now but the next thing you know you'll be flying a Jetson one in a few months or a few years or a few decades top mistakes for newbies is thinking that you can go out and just fly a mission have no idea what deliverable you're going to create and just use drone deploy and everything is just going to work that's not how it works okay the lighting the white balance composition of photos it all matters it's not as simple and easy as you think number two biggest issue is that thinking that the accuracy that you get out of your drone is absolutely amazing and is going to be great and you can do linear measurements and volumes and areas all based off of just your drone's GPS your drone's GPS is about as good as your phone's GPS which means it's not very good I've seen error on these Phantoms up to 12200 ft on the z-axis before so understand that even some of the most basic drone mapping applications may require ground control points biggest mistake I also see is offering surveying Services when you are not a surveyor trust me the states will go after you if you start to offer surveying Services now the oxymoron in all of this or the ironic piece of information in all of this is that most licensed surveyors are boomers or older what does this mean they're having younger guys going out and like taking you know elevations marking points with Rovers they're having all the young guys do this well now they're hiring the young guys to fly drones for them so when it comes to surveying don't mention accuracies don't offer surveying services and just don't offer a surveying stay away from it it's not worth it so if you really want the ins and the outs of drone mapping if you really want to learn how to really get the most out of of this workflow understand all the various variables that can impact your data then you need to take our comprehensive mapping course I literally had students last week who said they took the competitions course and it was like super shallow and not nearly as comprehensive as our course look competition is great because it drives us all to be better right but at the same time I want to give you everything that you need to know to be the best drone mapper that you can the only way that I can do that that is if I'm experienced in doing it and not just doing it a few times but doing it thousands of times so I hope that you understand this information that you're getting today comes from experience and like most great things in life we learn them as apprentices to a true master I'm not saying that I'm a true Master as there are many people that are out there that are much better than me but what I can do is give you a comprehensive education on creating 2D maps and 3D models that said check out our class at the Drone . we've got a lot of other classes too like the advanced mapping resources which goes over how to take your lifelike 3D models and put them on the Internet and how to annotate them and how to get the most out of them you can even take our Roofing inspection course which utilizes Bentley's context capture to help roofing contractors have permanent record of installation so when they go install that new myar roof and then another contractor breaks a hole through it they prove that when they finished the job the roof was absolutely perfect and now the liability falls on someone else and not them that's the value of drone data if you enjoyed this video let me know in the comments below I read them all now because well I find it very important for the feedback loop and I greatly appreciate everyone who is here who wants to understand drone mapping and modeling one of my newest favorite softwares is that Luma Labs or Luma doai it's just a video animation tool you can do that in pix wordy mapper uh for free um but honestly it's an amazing tool to use super small mini drones to create lifelike 3D models thanks for joining me today at drone [Music] HQ

Channel: Drone U

Views: 40,997

Keywords: remote pilot, droneU, ask drone U, remote pilot 101, part 107, drone training, drone license, Learn to fly a drone, Start a drone business, Part 107 exam, Commercial drone test, Faa drone license, Part 107 drone test, faa certificate, how to get your drone license, drone U, droneu, commercial drone license, How to fly a drone, How to start a drone business, Making money with a drone, how to fly drones commercially, learn to fly drones

Id: nFaQVGSAZRs

Length: 44min 10sec (2650 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 27 2023