Looking for mapping advice using Mavic 3

[Clatworthy]

Hi all,
New to using a drone other than to socially fly and take photos and after some help on basics for setting up the drone to take mapping photos.
Done a little bit of research myself so far and this is what I've come up with. I own a Mavic 3 and I'm using Maps Made Easy to stich the photos together.
What I've tried so far....
Construction site I'm trying to map is 200m wide and 800m long. Terrain is relatively flat beside the earth works we are build plus a few trees and some housing next door, were also working over water if that changes anything.
I had set up way points to fly one end to the other step over and fly back. Thinking that I would use the timed photo setting and have it fly in Cine mode and take a photo every 5 seconds.
When I tried this I can't move the gimble to -90 it will only let me take photo's at 0.
Next I aimed my drone to where I wanted it to fly and set the timer at 5 seconds and manually flew up and back. It worked and I stitched the photos. Not ideal because I wont be able to fly that same path again and it wasn't very straight.
I then found a tutorial that showed me how to have the drone take a photo at each way point and I could set the angle of the gimble. Helpful but very time consuming to try and hard to set up on the screen of my phone and hard to judge how far apart each way point is.

Questions:
Is there a computer program that will let me create a waypoint grid that I can load onto the drone?
How high should I be?
How fast should I be flying?
Distance between photos? I.E Grid size?

I did try searching for all these questions on here and on youtube but soooo much information comes up.

Any help is greatly appreciated.
Thanks
Sam

 

[Phantomrain.org]

You might Start with the Dronelink and Drone Deploy see if that is not what your looking for.
If that is the case than check out this guys video on how to use them as he has some really good setups.
@zeusfl

The Mavic 3 Pro and Mavic 3 Classic are not supported Sadly .

Hard to believe you can pick up and Air 2s or a Mavic 2 Pro or a slew of other drones to use this software , but not the Mavic 3 , you need to jump to the Enterprise versions for that.


Phantomrain.org
Gear to fly your Mavic 3 in the Rain. Land on the Water

 

[Meta4]

Hi all,
New to using a drone other than to socially fly and take photos and after some help on basics for setting up the drone to take mapping photos.

Until DJI decides to develop and release an SDK for the Mavic 3, you can't do serious mapping with it.
3rd party software developers who produce mapping apps like DroneDeploy and Pix4D are unable to modify their software to work with the features of the mavic 3 without it being supported with an SDK.

Questions:
Is there a computer program that will let me create a waypoint grid that I can load onto the drone?
How high should I be?
How fast should I be flying?
Distance between photos? I.E Grid size?

A real mapping app does all of this and more for you.
Here's a screenshot from DroneDeploy doing the mission planning and setup (for a Phantom 4 pro).

And here's the DroneDeploy app during the flying and capturing >250 images with a precise overlap for a 32 acre site.

You cannot do this without an app to help.
But for now the Mavic 3 is not useable with mapping apps.

 

[Sam36401]

@Clatworthy , This might help answer some questions. Looks like you have to be in Hyperlapse mode to use the Waypoints and it sounds like "Parameters such as camera action, altitude, speed, heading, gimbal tilt, zoom, and hovering time can all be defined for individual waypoints — which makes this intelligent flight feature incredibly useful for jobs such as filming real estate, mapping, or assessing the changes in an area over time."

Mavic 3 Waypoints

 

[flyingdutchman3]

Hi @Clatworthy - I typically include a birdseye view (straight down shot) as part of most of my deliverables on commercial RE shoots. For larger sites that required a birdseye view, I basically fly a manual mapping mission and stitch together in Photoshop. My Mavic 2 Pro seems to produce better mergeable images for Photoshop than my Mavic 3 using the manual flight method (why I don't know), as my Mavic 3's images seem to warp a bit on the edges. When I fly a mapping mission manually, I overlap each pass by 2/3rds using the grid on the screen, both forward and sideways, to create a path similar to those you see in the DroneDeploy images that others have posted. That said, to create a Waypoint mission that does this, you'd have to manually fly the mission in this manner, creating a new waypoint at each photo location, then saving it once you are done. After that you should be able to just launch the mission and the drone will do the work as if it was a DroneDeploy mission. It may not be ideal, but it's a work around for now. The alternative is to buy a Mavic 3E, which can fly mapping missions with the DJI Pilot 2 app (which I also have). When I fly in the Pilot 2 app, I turn off the dewarping feature so that I can use Photoshop to merge the images in post. Hope this helps.