Terrain Mapping One Square mile ?

[Dave Pitman]

I also am a Metashape convert

One of the ultra-rare instances where the superior solution is also magnitudes more affordable.

 

[adm_geomatics]

One of the ultra-rare instances where the superior solution is also magnitudes more affordable.

Perpetual license and software that has had it down for 10+ years is a model that many are still trying to catch. Many don’t realize Metashape is 4 years older than Pix 4D and it took them almost 5 years to figure out what Metashape was doing. I’m still running a 3 year old version and had the previous for 5 years before that.

 

[SteveBCH]

I've had a lot of success doing terrain awareness flights in the 100 acre size and up to about 160 acres with my P4RTK and have been processing the images using the 3DSurvey software for a little over four years. 640 acres is certainly a much larger animal but the basics remain the same. Built a powerful computer for that specific purpose which was fun and saved a ton of $ over buying something off the shelf with the features needed to process large data sets. Some of those TA flights have been as low as 35 meters when I wanted to get super high detail on small stream channels (e.g 4' wide) and for wetland delineation purposes. I'm not sure if the newer birds have the same issues as the P4RTK, but I want to pass along a couple of things I learned when the Terrain Awareness mode area has a lot of vertical relief. First, I discovered I needed to set the maximum height setting to some large value since the controller seems to look at the total elevation difference in the terrain model when applying flight restrictions. I initially couldn't get the drone to launch with a typical 390' maximum height and sometimes have to keep bumping up the max height value until it gets to something the controller will accept. Second, when flying a TA mode pattern, the drone will launch, rise to the elevation of the starting point of the flight pattern, and then take off horizontally to the starting point. If I'm flying a large area with a lot of vertical and the ground elevation of my launch point is much higher than the ground elevation of the pattern start point, the drone may rise vertically only maybe 20 feet before going horizontal. That's not a problem in an open area but if there are say 30' tall trees between the launch point and the pattern start point, or perhaps a rocky outcropping, the drone can head straight at a tree and then stop when the object avoidance kicks in. Best of luck.