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Thought y'all might like this read
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Bandwagon's Drones Thread
- Thread starter hodj
- Start date
Bandwagon
Kolohe
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Clouds like what you see in those pictures are absolutely perfect. Best lighting conditions you could hope for in photogrammetry. Overcast skies with bright, diffused lighting. Plenty of light, but no shadows.
I hate shadows because of how it affects my 3d data. The quality of the point cloud is just shit in shadows. I honestly don't care about it in the orthophoto for 2d drafting. 99% of my "clients" are internal and we use the orthophotos to generate the final product. If that wasn't the case, shadows would be more of an issue because it affects the visual quality (and most public clients have stipulations on it).
It's funny to think that "i fucking hate clouds" is basically the thought that got me here, though. I cold-called the company I now work for one day after I was pissed off that my multispectral mapping the day before was all wasted because of a single cloud passing overhead in the middle of my flights. I decided I was tired of clouds fucking up a whole days worth of work and I was going to go find clients where it doesn't matter. Surveyors don't care about multispectral.
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Bandwagon
Kolohe
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Here's an animation for the area in those pictures
iafi.org
Ice Age Flood Animation
This 3:50 minute animation, presented by the Crown Point Country Historical Society, illustrates the growth of the Cordilleran Ice Sheet, the damming and back-up of Glacial Lake Missoula, and the p…
iafi.org
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Vepil
Gamja
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Well we have a second drone/lidar up flying now and have both booked through July. The amount of work coming through the doors is absolutely crazy right now. Some of these jobs we have added around a 40% markup and people are still signing the proposals.
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Bandwagon
Kolohe
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Spending a lot of time playing with this lidar dataset from the demo. I'll probably write in more later, but just thought I'd jot some notes down
*300ft AGL looks great. ~500ft AGL is looking pretty shitty.
*Automatic ground classification is not flawless, but way better than I was expecting.
CAD Surface building
*Smooth point cloud 10% w/ 0.5ft spacing looks like it does a better job of normalizing near-surface noise than binning (so far) (Edit: maybe not...)
*Binning - Min - 10pt spacing to 20pt spacing (~.5ft to 1.5ft) looks like the sweet spot for this dataset, but I didn't see tops/toes starting to get rounded off until right around 20pt spacings
*Whitebox Tools "FeaturePreservingSmoothing" appears to work very well, but I haven't spent too much time looking it over yet.
*Whitebox Tools "SmoothVegetationResidual" looks potentially useful, but it's a paid tool so I didn't try it. (Interested in using it more for public lidar datasets though, based on a project I was working on yesterday with a geologist that was confusing vegetation presence in a NOAA lidar dataset as real geo features)
*300ft AGL looks great. ~500ft AGL is looking pretty shitty.
*Automatic ground classification is not flawless, but way better than I was expecting.
CAD Surface building
*Smooth point cloud 10% w/ 0.5ft spacing looks like it does a better job of normalizing near-surface noise than binning (so far) (Edit: maybe not...)
*Binning - Min - 10pt spacing to 20pt spacing (~.5ft to 1.5ft) looks like the sweet spot for this dataset, but I didn't see tops/toes starting to get rounded off until right around 20pt spacings
*Whitebox Tools "FeaturePreservingSmoothing" appears to work very well, but I haven't spent too much time looking it over yet.
*Whitebox Tools "SmoothVegetationResidual" looks potentially useful, but it's a paid tool so I didn't try it. (Interested in using it more for public lidar datasets though, based on a project I was working on yesterday with a geologist that was confusing vegetation presence in a NOAA lidar dataset as real geo features)
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Bandwagon
Kolohe
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I'm really surprised at how well the automatic ground classification worked in Terrasolid.
Vepil
Gamja
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Cool, I have not had the chance to try anything with it.
I misspoke above about the AGL we actually fly at 200' the lidar and 400' if we are doing an ortho in hard identification areas. Doing that transmission line in the mountains and this is what the DJI terrain follow looks like sticking to 200' AGL on a DEM file.
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Vepil
Gamja
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So the insurance paid out on the DJI m210 that crashed and work gave me the drone/batteries/controller to do with as I want. I tested and it appears no electronics were harmed in the crash just a lot of physical damage that was in the 3k range to replace and some parts not available. I bought a 550mm carbon fiber frame and planning on transferring the guts to it and see if I can get it flying again. It will be ugly and it will be glorious if I can get it up and running flying for a second time.
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Vepil
Gamja
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Also forgot to give you an update, I started using the Rock Robotic Cloud to create contours and it is surprisingly very close. Close enough in the survey world that things you notice in the LiDAR and contours would be easily walked past in the field and never recorded. Overall we feel its good enough for certain types of surveys and will be using it to speed up delivery and increase profit on some of these jobs.
Cost me $460 to get 1' contours on a 227 AC site using their cloud vs me creating the ground points/breaklines to come up with the nearly the same at a cost of about $3500. Nice little addition to our profit line and my bonuses this year.
Cost me $460 to get 1' contours on a 227 AC site using their cloud vs me creating the ground points/breaklines to come up with the nearly the same at a cost of about $3500. Nice little addition to our profit line and my bonuses this year.
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