Scanning Buildings Using a Drone

[Music] all right first video it alright [Applause] what's up everybody welcome to this first installment of i don't even know what the name of this channel is supposed to but that doesn't but that's not important because we're here to have fun i'm here to have fun and i'm gonna take you on a journey with me today we're gonna be making a 3d model of the canadian center for architecture here in montreal using nothing more but a drone let's get into it now who is this for well you might be an architecture student who wants to spice it up a little bit or maybe you want to just learn how to do it maybe you want to be able to create 3d models of an entire neighborhood or of your site and maybe you want to take some creative decisions early on because now you have an accurate 3d model of the site that you're doing maybe this is for you if you're interested in doing urban planning and you just want to have a again a skilled model of your neighborhood this is for you or maybe you're just a young professional just like myself who is fed up of starting a project just with a polyline oh yeah this is why i said there's like a little poly line here and there's a bunch of polynomials but you don't know anything else you know just a bunch of heights but it's very difficult to make building shake hands i don't know probably heard that before i definitely like to do that or you're somebody who's into 3d rendering and you don't want to spend hours and hours just modeling and modeling sites when you can just kind of fly a drone scan it quickly put in the back of your rendering call it a day have an amazing background maybe that's it i like to do that sometimes too now i mentioned we're doing this with a drone and we're gonna use a process that's called photogrammetry now what is photogrametry well i'm so glad you asked and i'm also so glad that i'm not going to tell you this is not the focus of this video today we're focusing on making the 3d model of the cca not necessarily understanding the technology that goes behind it but all you need to know is that you take a bunch of photos you put them in a software and voila it gives you 3d model in my books there's three ways to do this one of them is to just take a bunch of photos using your cell phone of anything a tree maybe that you want to put in your rendering or like a statue or a piece of furniture i don't care you can just take a bunch of photos with your phone put them inside of a software something along the lines of meta shape mushroom blender autodesks recap and probably there's more and i'm sure there's more and then you make a 3d model out of it one of the downsides of this especially for architects is that it doesn't have a skill your model is basically unitless there's a second way that you can do this and i've used it maybe only once and that is to take a video of the object you're trying to do what's the downside of this will you end up with a ton of photos and now your software needs to spend hours calculating this don't worry about it with the drone is going to be exactly the same and this leads me to the third option which is exactly what we're doing today and this is to fly a drone above a building take as many photos as you can from as many angles as possible and i'm talking vertical horizontal the whole shebang one added advantage of this method is that your drone has a gps and that means that every photo would have the gps data and also the tilt of the gimbal and this is gonna make it first of all faster second of all you will end up with a model that is to scale and already oriented to the north if you're an architect this is already great now which brings me to the second point what kind of gear are we using today and honestly ugh okay the mavic mini not the second one the first one but it's going to do absolutely fantastic today so why is my hand like this absolutely fantastic today now there's few things we should keep in mind about this drone it has an only 12 megapixel camera which means that if you're flying further away from the building you won't be able to get perfect results which means that you should be able to take photos from far away and also pretty up close so that you can get that detail in the facade if you know what i mean maybe the brick maybe the stone maybe the windows maybe the fences yeah probably not the fences nobody cares about the fences if you have access to a bigger better and a meaner drone something that can actually track the building while you just kind of say go left and you would follow the building around this would be even better but hey we're flying the mini today and uh i think it's going to be perfect i think we're going to be surprised as to how much detail we're able to get from this little shmug now keep in mind it really depends where you live some places might require to have a license here in canada there's the weight limit for the drone so if you have a drone that's 250 grams or above you need a license beautiful thing about the dji mini is that it's 249 grams so it's considered the choice i don't need a license i don't need to ask anybody well unless i'm flying super close to windows like what i'll be doing in the cca so uh which brings me to another point if you're going to be scanning a building make sure you let the people know or at least you ask for permission just imagine you're minding your own business and there's a drone right there on the window that just goes hey how's it going you don't want that you want to be you don't want to be that guy you don't want to be the guy who flies with the drone super close and you freak everybody out also if you have people also who are asking you hey what are you doing you can say i have a permission from that particular institution don't worry about it and if there are no you can be like my goodness just go ask and get out of my face anyways time to go outside i'll see you in front of the cca [Music] the cca yeah that is a voice actor and yeah i'm gonna link him in the description below located downtown montreal one of the largest of its kind it was founded in 1979 as an independent study center and museum to further the understanding of architecture and to help establish architecture as a public concern both for those with little or no knowledge of the building arts and for those who are most instrumental in shaping knowledge through research the story of the cca building really begins with this house in the middle the shaughnessy house we need to thank a lady by the name of phyllis lambert who recognized the value of the house as it was the last remaining from a series of second empire buildings along renek boulevard the new building is heavily influenced by it from its symmetry to its plan to the materials chosen both outside and inside [Music] anywhere back home it's time to align the photos i'm using a software called metashape you can get a 30 day free trial from the link in description below just saying this is not sponsored just the software of choice that's all the main steps we're taking tonight are the following align the photos which is going to create a loose point cloud well depending on how many points we specify we'll see this in a second optimize the cameras once this is done then we're going to create a dense point cloud we can actually use straight in revit if need be so you can even stop there if this is your purpose and then you guessed it we're going to create a mesh and then we're going to create a texture based on the mesh using the photos from the drone all right let's go for the purpose of this model i'll be using the highest possible settings all the time which for most of the time is an overkill because you don't need that much detail especially if you're doing a neighborhood or just an area especially if it's gonna be in the background somewhere so maybe don't use the exact same settings as i do this is gonna take a lot of time probably the dance cloud will take between seven and ten hours and if you don't have that much time just choose lower settings anyways you're gonna see this in the process now that we are in front of the computer i've split my screen into two parts on the left side we have a brand new file of metashape and on the right side we have all the drone photos i've taken now metashape works in chunks which means that those are chunks of data captured and since in this case we have only one set of photos we will be using only one chunk so what i'm going to do is right click just rename it into drone photos it would be easier to to organize if you have multiple sets so the first thing i'll do i'll just select all of them control a and drag and drop them into the drone photos now let me make this full screen you see them appearing metashape is starting to read all of them one by one now if i hit the little camera button here you can see that metashape is already recognizing where the photos have been taken and the reason for that is because it's using the gps data in the drone or inside of each photo so this is kind of nice so the next thing i would want to do now that i'm having too much fun with this is to right click on the on the chunk on drawn photo that we've called it and i'm going to go all the way down to process align photos and let's see what we have here we have the general tab and the advanced tab in general it's asking you for the accuracy highest high medium low lowest now to my understanding if you select high what this would do is it would take the image as it is in my case the mavic mini takes 12 megapixel images so this means that the high setting would keep it as 12 megapixels and it's going to try to find common points between the photos if you hit medium is going to take half the resolution if you click on the highest it is going to scale up the image analyze it then in order to be a little bit more precise now because i have nothing better to do and i have a lot of time to waste i'm going to click on the highest maybe you don't have to reference progression source i'm not sure what this does but let's leave it as it is now this is an interesting tab the key point limit this is the amount of points that metashape is going to look for in each image usually by default it sits at forty thousand and forty thousand would give you a pretty decent result now the next one type points limit this means that in between every photo it will be looking for four thousand points in common in order to create a 3d model you can leave it at that that is absolutely fine of course the more you put the more time it will take now in my case because i want to have a fairly detailed model of the canadian center for architecture i'm going to put a hundred thousand points and then i'm going to leave everything as it is adaptive camera model fitting stationary tile points that whatever i'm just gonna hit okay now this is going to take a while and of course i'm not going to have us just sit here and watch it i've already done it so i'm just going to skip to the final model and walk you through the rest of the steps i'm going to see on the flip side once this is done the result is going to look something like this this is the initial or loose cloud or as metashape refers to it as tie points and it begins to give you a pretty good idea of what the site looks like now keep in mind what is amazing about this is that it is all ready to scale and oriented to the north of course if you want to use this in revit or any other software just to measure a few basic distances you could use this as well but again we are here to make a 3d model of this so let's keep going now you would also notice that there's a lot of noise around so there's the cc but there's of course everything else that happened around it so there is a way for us to clean this you can just come here to this icon which is the selection tool i like to use the free form selection and i can just kind of come and select everything i don't need and i can just simply delete it however i'm going to leave this operation for the dense cloud now once you have your loose point cloud what we're going to do is we're going to optimize the cameras so what we're going to do is right click on the chunk process again optimize cameras and you just leave everything and you hit ok this would take about 30 seconds to optimize them and this would supposedly make the following processes a little bit faster once all of this is done and by the way there's something i like to do is to go into details right click on the first image and to say estimate image quality and then i would say do it for all the cameras now what this would do is it would give an a quality index to every single image and you can also classify them and usually if you have an image that is very blurry it would have a very low index so let's see this one okay this is a perfect example so let's say this is something i should have deleted just because when i generate the textures it might give me less polished look let's put it this way also the software is going to have a lot more difficult time matching this photo to other photos okay let's get back to our model now that we have optimized the cameras the next thing we want to do is to create the dense point cloud the way we do this is we come back to the chunk which we already called drone photos right click on it go down to process and then we say build dense cloud hit ok on this now because i told you that i'm going to create the highest possible quality that i can get i will just leave it at ultra high then again maybe you don't have to do this especially if you have maybe a weaker machine with like a four core processor and you don't necessarily have an entire day to spend waiting so i'm just going to leave it at ultra high depth filtering now this is an interesting one because depth filtering pretty much what it does is that if it has a bunch of points on a surface and they have different heights it's going to smooth them out a little bit so i just leave it by default on moderate and it looks pretty good we can smooth the surfaces afterwards anyways now also what you want to click for sure is to calculate the point confidence and you see why this becomes useful afterwards is because we can eliminate a lot of the trees in one shot so i'm just going to hit ok and then it's going to take maybe several hours to do it and then we'll be right back okay welcome back and this is the dance point cloud as you can see it's a lot of detail even in the surroundings a lot of unnecessary information let's see when we talk about trees and this is giving us 228 million common points now keep in mind this is not a 3d model this is still a point cloud so if i zoom in you begin to see the individual dots now this looks amazing again you can simply export this maybe put it in recap put it in revit and start designing or building your environment as it is on the other hand you might say well there's just way too much information i need to clean it up a little bit so i'm going to show you a trick how you can get rid of most of the trees in a few seconds and in a few clicks but then of course you would have to do a lot of manual cleaning with the selection tool that i showed you earlier and the way we would get rid of most of the trees is by filtering by confidence and let me just show you what this looks like up here where you have the dance point cloud menu you just hit the drop down menu and you want to show the dense cloud confidences now this is going to give you a pretty cool looking model but what this is telling you is that everything that is in red and orange has a very low confidence meaning that metaship was not really sure about it everything that is in blue though meta shape is really sure about it and this is usually because there's a lot of photos overlapping at the same place so let's say if i'm looking at the shaughnessy house i can see that there's a quite a bit of confidence into the breaking into the facade not so much in the windows but this is actually quite normal because there's a lot of reflections and the reflections are always different when we fly the drone so what we want to do is get rid of everything that is red so the way we do this is we go up to tools dense cloud filter by confidence the scale goes from 0 to 255 0 being the least confident which means everything in red so just for the experiment let's see we want to see everything from 1 to 255 okay this was uneventful let's do it again dense filter by confidence we want to see everything from 2 to 255 okay now this looks much better so as you can see we got rid of most of the canopies but maybe let's push it a step further tools dense cloud filter by confidence let's see three okay i think that this is an amazing start and this is exactly what i would do and then i'll clean everything by hand so the way we would do this is go to tools dense cloud again filter by confidence and then i would just say show me everything from 0 to two because three it's already included so this is everything we want to get rid of and also i want you to keep on the amount of dense cloud points we have so what i'm going to do is because i want to get rid of all of these i would just simply select them all and hit the delete button now they're gone so the next thing i do tools dense point cloud reset filter yes and i'm left with the most essential information now also just take a look at how many points we just eliminated by doing this and then i'm going to go to just seeing the dense point cloud which would leave me only with the building and now of course i can get rid of everything else so i'll give you an example how to do this if you hit zero on your keyboard you will get a plan view and if you hit 5 on your keyboard you will go into ortho mode so then you can simply select everything you don't need up and this would leave you with a much much less information to work with which is a good thing because this is how you reduce time all right well i've already done this process and i've also cleaned up most of the trees because what i would usually do is come close select all of this delete it okay now let me show you the final product already so in this case i have already spent the time to clean the dense point cloud and this is what it's giving me we have only 73 million points which is great and again if you want to use this in revit you can simply just go to file export export points and that's it however we're not done yet because we're making a 3d model right so the next thing you do is you right click process build mesh give it a second and now you have two choices either use the dance cloud that you just created and that you claimed which means that it will not be using all of the tree information which is great or you can use the depth maps and what the depth maps are the software creates a depth map for each image trying to understand how deep certain elements are so if i come here in my photos preview and if i say show me large icons let's see what's a good example let's say this image you can see that everything that is in red or orange is closer to the camera than everything that is in green so this is a depth map pretty much meta shape was able to tell us what is close and what is far so let's say in this case knows that the cca is closer and that the rest of the buildings are somewhere far away so depth maps usually work amazing it's just that this time we have a lot of trees around us and i don't want to use them because i've already cleaned the dance model so what i'm just going to do is again right click process build mesh and then i would say use the dance cloud [Music] that's it and i'll just hit okay and in my case this took about 30 minutes to complete and let me show you what it looks like shaded all right so this is the 3d model it has a few holes but this is because we have the trees in there that's fine in your rendering software we can just put trees back in place and kind of hide the hole and as you can see it looks pretty good but then not that amazing because we're missing a lot of information in the in the surfaces but this is fine though because we haven't generated the textures yet and this is going to be the next step now i'm really happy about this because it already sits on its own site and it's kind of ready to be plug and play now there's only one thing i'm going to show you how to smoothen a certain surface because sometimes when it's creating the model for the grass you can have a lot of variation in the height so i'm going to hit 0 to give me a plan view i'm going to hit 5 so that it would give me an orthographic view and i'm just going to zoom into a patch of grass here okay let me grab the selection tool and i'll just do this okay so we selected the mesh let's let's get a closer look now this mesh has already been smoothened once maybe if we look from underneath oh voila okay but let's let's look from underneath so now you see that there is still a little bit of variation so i'm going to go to tools mesh smooth mesh i find that 20 usually works pretty well for grass and for paving so i'm just gonna say okay up and it became a little bit smoother so you can use this to minimize variation in grass especially if you're gonna cut it afterwards and replace it with i don't know v-ray grass or if you're going to use it in lumion okay so the next stop would be to create the texture the way we do this as usual go to your chunk right click process build texture so now we just want to make sure that the texture type is set to diffuse the source data is of course the images from the drone and then the mapping mode is generic blending mode mosaic and then you want to set up your your resolution of the texture now if you leave this number at one what this would do is it will create one 4k image for the entire model that sounds great if you're looking at it from very very far away but at the same time it does not give you a lot of detail so maybe try something like four this means that there will be four 4k textures to map the entire model which means that it will be able to give you a lot more information in each of them leave everything turned on and just hit ok now once this is done let me show you what it looks like with the textures on it so as you can see the facades which are unobstructed look absolutely gorgeous and this can become a great backdrop to any any of your renderings let's see how it looks from the front it looks pretty good to me and then again if i want to create an even higher resolution texture i would just say i don't know give me a 4k texture but maybe give me 10 of them so in this way i'll be able to get a lot more detail from these stones let's say but then again it depends what i want to use it for and then the final step would be to export this into fbx and import it into your favorite softwares the way you do this you make sure you've selected the chunk file export export model and in this case it's already fbx i have an exports folder and i'll say cca model 2. save what you want to make sure that you're using local coordinates that you're not using the gps coordinates because not every software is able to read this properly um yes you want to export the vertex colors which means that when you're in not the rendered mode you'll still be able to make out the building and all the colors of every single element if you need the the vertex normals you can export that uh i personally don't need the cameras nor the markers the texture in jpeg sounds amazing to me and then everything else i'll just leave it as default and i'll just hit ok and you know what just because i'm in the mood i'm going to show you a very quick and very sample rendering that i did in rhino using that very model see you on the flip side now as i promised you i wanted to give you just a quick example of something you can do with the 3d model in this case i'm using rhino and i have really few simple things happening in this example all i really have is two bros keys brosking and kind of smiling at each other and in the backfire distance you can see few vr meshes with our of trees and this is honestly everything there is to this particular scene i tried something on the backside it was not that successful even though it looks pretty cool anyways let's get back to our bros keys this is it in my case i'm using v-ray and as you can see there's a little bit of atmospheric fog in the back and also a little bit of depth of field so it can give you a result like this again nothing more model for the guys model for the trees and the 3d model that we came up with using metashape i really hope that this tutorial was useful i'm going to see outside of the screen now but yes i shaved i really hope that this short overview of the canadian center for architecture and also slash tutorial was useful and interesting to you if so i would appreciate if you smash that like button i'm also curious to know what you think about it was it useful was it not useful was it too fast was it too slow would you like me to go in more depth in certain areas maybe in the storytelling or maybe in the tutorial part i'm just curious to know because this is the first time i'm doing anything of this sort and i plan on making more of these videos tutorials one of the reasons i'm doing this is because i came to montreal 10 years ago and in a way rediscovering the city is super exciting to me not only that but i also get to appreciate the environment i live in and therefore it's awesome also at the same time some of these things that i would like to discuss in future videos use either little tricks or little technologies that were either not available to me back when i started architecture or there were set of skills that i wish i knew at the very beginning which would have helped me design better projects throughout my bachelor's or masters of mcgill so i really hope that for the student slash freshman architect these things can be super useful and also that maybe you can one-up your game anyways i'll stop rambling this is already a long enough video let me know what you think i would really appreciate it of course you'll be able to find the 3d model in the description below i will also link some of the important things slash links literature that i used to make this project it was a lot of fun and see on the flip side you guys

Channel: Daniel Kuzev

Views: 2,680

Keywords: drone, photography, photogrammetry, dji, mavic, mini, metashape, cca, canadiancenterforarchitecture, montreal, mcgill, tutorial

Id: UDi3AsabPzw

Length: 27min 18sec (1638 seconds)

Published: Tue May 25 2021