Drone 3D Modeling for Beginners - Low Cost Solutions

Welcome to the first lecture for this series, Drone 3D Modeling for beginners. If you've always wanted to learn more about building 3D Models with your drone for fun, this is the class for you. If you're interested in getting into 3D Modeling with drones for your own business, and you have no prior experience making these types of models, this class is for you as well. Students who are already using drones to do modeling in their businesses will probably not find this class useful, as they're already beyond the scope of the course. Finally, we're going to talk about the most reasonable costs associated with getting into 3D modeling so that you don't end up spending thousands of dollars on something you're not even selling yet.

This lecture reviews the basic steps involved in generating 3D models with a drone. First you must capture the images you need for your model. After capturing the images you'll process them with a desktop solution like PhotoScan or Pix4D Discovery, or you'll upload your images to a cloud service like Drone Deploy, Pix4D, or Maps Made Easy. Finally once you've completed your model you'll want to share it with the world, friends and family, or potential clients.

In this lecture we'll review some of the most popular capture applications out there. These Apps are used on Android devices and iOS devices, and we'll be specifically looking at Apps that work with DJI drone products. We'll talk about Ground Station Pro, Map Pilot, Pix4D Capture, Drone Deploy, and in a later lecture we'll also mention Litchi.

All 3D modeling capture applications for DJI drones do very similar things. Plan your flight, capture images at regular intervals, fly autonomously, and return to you at the completion of their missions. You can capture NADIR images (shooting straight down at the ground or at a slight angle to the ground) and you can also do orbits around smaller objects for modeling as well. All images need some level of overlap for matching up to create your model, and the applications go about it in the same way over and over again.

There are multiple 3D Modeling software packages out there. They all perform similar functions. You import your images (or upload to the cloud) and process them with the software. Each of the programs helps align your images, generate a point cloud, create a 3D mesh over your point cloud, and add a texture layer to your final 3D Model. The applications we'll be using in the rest of the course are:

• Drone Deploy - A cloud based solution. The minimum price of using this service is $129 per month, or $996 for the year.

• Maps Made Easy - A cloud based solution. The price depends on the size of model and features you want in it. You purchase points from the company to process your models.

• Photoscan from Agisoft. $179 for a "standard" license with many disabled features, $3500 for the Pro version with all features enabled.

• Pix4D - The pricing here starts at "Free" for Pix4D discovery which has mostly disabled features, next level $50 per month, and for the full version (desktop and cloud) $3500 per year.

In this lecture we'll setup a large flight mission to create a 3D model of a section of the Granite Dells in Prescott Arizona. The mission will be laid out with Map Pilot, and will be setup as a multi-battery mission which will be flown by a DJI Mavic 2 Pro.

In this lecture the drone is launched and controlled by Map Pilot. We won't watch the whole flight, as it's just a drone going back and forth on a grid pattern. At the start of the flight we'll find out that Map Pilot can alter the duration of your flight based on light conditions and wind conditions as well. In this case, the mission is extended into a 4 battery mission taking more than an hour to fully fly.

In this lecture we'll review generating a 3D Model with PhotoScan and the data we collected in our Map Pilot mission. The process is incredibly time consuming, so the lecture will be paused off and on to cut down students' time "watching paint dry." The reality of building large 3D models with drones is that processing time can go on for hours or days.

Taking a closer look at Photoscan in this lecture and some of the basic tools associated with Photoscan. With the standard edition we can generate our models, export models for other programs, and refine our models as well.

If you're going to use Photoscan standard on your desktop you still need a way to share your models online. Sketchfab is one solution that works very well. In this lecture we'll talk about exporting the model for Sketchfab and then displaying it on the service.

Can you generate drone 3D Models for free with Pix4D? Apparently you can with Pix4D Discovery. While you can't export anything after completing models with this version of Pix4D (models, point clouds, etc), you can practice your Pix4D model generation on your computer to see how your flight captures are going. This is a great way to work on your drone modeling and mapping before you heavily invest in software, hardware, and your potential business.

Pix4D Discovery is for non commercial use. So you won't be using this on your YouTube Channel if it's monetized, or for commercial presentations. Think of it as your sandbox for your personal testing only.

In this lecture we follow along with the processing steps for Pix4D Discovery. The lecture uses Pix4D Model as "Discovery" is for non-commercial use only. But the steps for model generation in both "Model" and "Discovery" are very similar, so you'll get the full idea of how building a model with this version of Pix4D works.

This video was created in February of 2022.  We'll talk about the no cost to low cost Open Source Mapping application known as WebODM.  This application can be used to generate 2D and 3D models easily, for a very reasonable price ($0 to $57 tops).  The application can be used on Windows, Mac, and Linux

Of all the 3D modeling applications out there, WebODM offers a very simple interface, with a lot of power behind it.  For those just starting into Drone Modeling, this might be a great desktop solution for you!

In our final lecture we discuss our options for creating 3D models with a Drone that doesn't cost a lot of money. As students have discovered in this course, there are some fairly reasonable solutions for making simple models for free. We also discuss the option of using higher end processing software temporarily with trials.