A Drone Construction Progression Example - A Full Project

In this introduction to the course students will learn about the topics we'll be covering.

We'll actually be talking through an entire Drone Construction Progression project.  The initial job for the client started in July of 2019.  As of the production of this series, the job will be completed in May of 2020.  We'll be talking about how AZDrone landed the job, the setup needed for creating a good progression report, the tools used for data collection, and the products we handed over to the clients.

Students will get a first hand look at how the final product delivery came to be. 

In this lecture we'll talk about how the clients found me, and how they were almost unable to get in touch with me.  As you build your own drone business you have to keep more in mind than just flying your drone.  Are your business cards up to date with the correct phone number and e-mail?  Does your website give people a way to contact you? 

You've got to pay attention to your online presence!  If people can't find you, then you won't get the call.

Doing drone work is a highly technical endeavor.  It's not just about flying drones and getting some video footage and still images.  One of the most powerful tools for getting found and reach new clients is by using your internet presence.  And building an online presence takes more skills than just drone piloting.

A good website goes a long way toward reaching new clients.  Search Engine Optimization plays an important role.  Social media also plays a role in my client outreach. 

In this lecture I talk more about getting found online, and how we're doing it at AZDrone.  It will be up to you to develop your own process in order to reach new clients, and hopefully this lecture will get you thinking about your next steps toward reaching your audience.

In this lecture we're going to start planning our drone construction progression job. First we'll make sure to examine the job location thoroughly. As we document the job location for ourselves we'll also start planning for what tools will work best on location.  Please note, while you can plan flights remotely, I strongly encourage you to get in the habit of putting "boots on the ground" before you commit to your flight plans.

Drone Flight Capture Applications and their selection will be very important to the project's success.  Selecting tools that can be used to autonomously fly our job site time and time again is incredibly important.  Selecting the wrong tools could cost you a lot of extra time.

For this project I selected Map Pilot and Litchi for my flight planning.  Both are fantastic Autonomous Drone Flight Apps.  Each has a place for this project. 

In this video we talk a little about the App selection, and then we dive into a short talk about using Map Pilot for creating a 2D Orthomosaic Model for our clients (the ortho is one of our deliverables for the client).  We don't get into a full tutorial of Map Pilot's features, but we do cover the basic layout of the job site with Map Pilot that was used for every flight in this project.

In this lecture we'll talk about setting up waypoint missions for both time lapse video as well as time lapse still images.  Creating re-usable flight paths is key to successfully show job site progression over time.  There are several great flight applications out there for doing this part of the job.  In the case of this particular project, the Litchi App was used.

I offer another course on Udemy called, "Litchi Waypoint Missions For Your Drone Business," where I cover multiple topics on using Litchi in your business.  Part of the course covers setting up Litchi Flights while you're in the field.  That course uses the same job site we're covering in this class.  I decided it would be useful to include 2 lectures from that class so you could see "hands on" how the missions were built, and the results of those missions.

This lecture covers the mission setups, and the next lecture shows you the execution of those missions.

This is the second Litchi Mission lecture from my Litchi class.  In this lecture you'll watch flights actually being run from the Litchi setups we did in the previous lecture.  These flight paths generated with Litchi are used each month for our official flights on behalf of the client.

After capturing all of our images / data the next step is pretty straightforward.  We need to get our work organized and ready for post processing / editing.  We've got JPGs for the Orthomosaic, we've got video for the time lapse flights through the property, we've got more JPGs for still image time lapses......  Whew!  And in some cases we might have additional data depending on what our clients are expecting for their deliverables!  Maybe some 360 video, maybe 360 still images, maybe virtual walk throughs at the properties. 

Where we put our data, and how we organize it will impact our workflow in the office.

In the case of my workflow, I always start off with the Orthomosaic model.  I know how many images there should be after the flight, so it's easy to identify images used in the model. 

The images are loaded up into Metashape Pro, and the modeling process begins.  Aligning the images, creating dense point clouds, a mesh for the model, textures, Digital Elevation Models, and finally the Ortho model.  And if you're not using Metashape you might have some other tasks with cloud based solutions or other desktop solutions.

This lecture is not intended to cover all the ins and outs of Metashape.  Remember, we're showing you through the whole process for this particular progression job. 

After completing the ortho I move on to doing the time lapse videos for the clients.  In the case of this lecture the video editing we do will use Final Cut Pro.  We will not be showing "before & after" video in this particular series.  Instead we'll be editing together the latest flight with the same flight paths as the prior months.  Sometimes clients want to see that "before & after," and sometimes they just want to see the present state of the ongoing job.

This is not a course on video editing and production.  While AZDrone.net uses Final Cut Pro, it's not the only editing solution out there.  Most video editors do very similar things though. In the next bonus lecture we'll show a "Before & After" time lapse video.

In this follow up lecture, we'll actually take a look at another job site, and the video time lapse being built for that client.  We show off the construction area prior to the start of work (in January), and then we overlay our latest flight in April.  This should give you a good idea of how you can line clips up to make smooth transitions between the start of the project and it's current level of progress.

In addition to time lapse video for the client, I also provided a small set of time lapse still images as well.  Using Litchi's waypoint missions I set up several photos that would be reshot each month.  The clients could see very easily the major site changes with just a few images.

In this lecture we talk about 2 different ways I could present the images for the clients.  There are of course many ways to create still image slideshows beyond how I approached the task.  In the end, it will be up to you to decide on how you'd like to craft your presentations.

In this lecture we talk about how I approached providing the job deliverables to the client.  In my case I decided to craft custom web pages for each flight.  The customers received a new web page each month showing off the flight video, stills for time lapse, and an Orthomosaic model that showed the current month and previous month.  The clients could go through each web page to see the major changes over time.

In addition to a very custom solution, we also provided Drop Box access to all of the original data collected. 

In the final class for this series I talk about the tools I used, and other tools that are available to you today.  You don't need to use the same drones or apps that I do.  The intent of this class is to help you think about how you would approach larger drone projects like this one.  Construction Progressions are one of many things you can do on behalf of construction companies.  While the tools are important, having a good workflow at the ready is extremely important as well.

Hopefully this course has spurred your own creativity, and you're already considering new approaches to larger scale projects that come your way.