Mavic 3E geometric route vs slope vs Agisoft Mission Planner

[jaja6009]

I finally had a chance to use the M3E's new slope and geometric shape planners.
The slope produced an incredibly detailed facade of a building that could be easily used to inspect the building.
For a full building I would need 4 slope missions and a traditional nadir for the roof or I could manually adjust the last upper flight lines to angle the camera down more.




I next tried the geometric planner and it also made a very detailed model of the building and used 369 images.


My final test will be Agisoft's Mission planner which has you make a low resolution model of the area of interest. Then Agisoft will make a flight plan that can avoid obstacles in the area of interest such as powerlines and other hazards.
Agisoft's flight plan interestingly enough will only need 260 images to fully cover the building as compared to Pilot 2's geometric planner needing 369. This is around 30% less images, so this will be a dramatic decrease in processing time, especially scaled to larger projects (If this ratio holds true for other structures).

I will post the result of the resulting models from the Pilot 2 geomtric planner vs Agisoft planner.

Agisoft Mission Planner





While oblique flights in the past have made some incredible models, these new flight modes ensure that the buildings sides are as good as the roof. You can now see under eaves and such and the GSD for the walls is equal to the roof.

 

[jaja6009]

A final summary on this is that if you have Metashape, use the Flight Planner! It can provide complete coverage of the building with less images with the negative being you must fly the building an initial time. But this flight can be a general quick flight with minimum overlap and the outputs needed are a tie point cloud and then a low or medium resolution obj model.

The quality of the model from the DJI Pilot 2 and Agisoft flight plans are close enough to say they are equal. Agisofts GSD is better in terms of being equal on the walls and roof.

The Agisoft flight plan imported into a Mavic 3E very easily and flew a very safe, slow route, stopping for each image.

DJI Pilot 2's Slope or Geometric routed were faster without a full stop for the taking of an image.

Both have use cases and both offer great options for making a very good 3D model.

Agisoft


Agisoft




In terms of processing software, I only have access to Drone Deploy, Pix4Dmapper, Pix4D matic and Agisoft Professional. I would love to see what Bentley Context Capture could do.

In terms of the software Agisoft won hands down with the examples above being from Agi.

Drone Deploy had trouble with the railings and metal staircase. But the facades equaled Agisoft.



Pix4Dmapper did well with the facades but the thin items like the railing were the normal Pix4D blobing.



Pix4Dmatic was about the same as Pix4D mapper.





Agisoft cloud is currently down. When it comes back online I can share the models so anyone can make their own assessment.