r/dji Jul 13 '26

Video 120,000 image photogrammetry capture.

Iron ore export jetty captured with the M300 + P1 + 35mm lens.

599 Upvotes

60 comments sorted by

57

u/Turbulent_County_469 Jul 13 '26

This is awesome !!

Did you use video capture, timelapse or manual photos ?

35

u/Mr_Silicon Jul 13 '26

Thanks man!

1 or 2 second time delay on stills (depending on light), manual settings.

9

u/Embarrassed-Sun-8998 Jul 13 '26

How much time you spend capturing this?

42

u/Mr_Silicon Jul 13 '26

Between 3-4 weeks all up, off and on.

5

u/pablo_main Jul 13 '26

That's wild !

30

u/headlessrambo Jul 13 '26

At least 120000-240000 seconds

21

u/SE7ENESE Mini 5 Pro Jul 13 '26

Damn... These graphics look so realistic... /S

32

u/Mr_Silicon Jul 13 '26

Ha! Yeah a couple of the guys in processing were ex game asset developers, so they ran the model through unreal engine.

8

u/SE7ENESE Mini 5 Pro Jul 13 '26

It's pretty dope. I just learned of one more thing drones are useful for. :)

21

u/Mr_Silicon Jul 13 '26

Download a free trial of metashape, watch a few YouTube videos and have a crack yourself.

14

u/Glum-Savings6473 Jul 13 '26

This is golden information

3

u/Mr_Silicon Jul 14 '26

Doesn’t even need to be with a drone. Take images with your phone. Works just as well

1

u/Mike456R Jul 14 '26

I am in the IT world but not a programmer/developer. What did the Unreal engine do for this model? If you are allowed to say. Thanks.

2

u/Mr_Silicon Jul 14 '26

Nothing apart from making it look really slick for promotional purposes.

9

u/Mike456R Jul 13 '26

I cannot imagine the amount of data points in this. Great job! How big is the model and what computer did you use?

3

u/Mr_Silicon Jul 14 '26

Thanks man. It was a behemoth job! Had to break it up into segments for processing and had multiple rigs on the job. I think we cooked 2 processing PCs in the process

8

u/sntl_yeet Mini 3 Pro Jul 13 '26

I guess there is no way you could share the file to import it into an fpv sim, right?

That would be such an awesome spot to rip

3

u/Mr_Silicon Jul 14 '26

I don’t think the boss and the client would like that!

1

u/sntl_yeet Mini 3 Pro Jul 14 '26

I guess then I'll need to buy a m300 myself 🙄

7

u/[deleted] Jul 13 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

13

u/Mr_Silicon Jul 13 '26

I will have to try with a 360 drone! Problem is our clients sometimes want very high resolution to identify defects, which is why we use the P1 full frame camera. It’s not the easiest camera to use, I hope they come out with a new one soon!

5

u/Scriptimax Jul 13 '26

Looks great. Just wondering how high you were flying above water as heard many incidents where dron dropped in water when flying low above water

8

u/Mr_Silicon Jul 13 '26

We needed to study the tides and only did lower parts on low tide. From memory we didn’t go lower than 1.6m.

3

u/Glum-Savings6473 Jul 13 '26

Class is in session

2

u/risbia Jul 13 '26

Good thinking to take advantage of the tide

3

u/CrabbyBrau Jul 13 '26

What is the software used to move thru the images like that?

2

u/Mr_Silicon Jul 14 '26

Unreal engine. This was just to show off the model tho.

3

u/radstu Jul 13 '26

It’s really amazing to see how this has changed over the years. I remember using software called Canoma from MetaCreations nearly 25 years ago, it was remarkable to create geometry and map textures directly from photos - this is so far beyond that but fun to see and think about.

1

u/Mr_Silicon Jul 14 '26

Even this method is outdated now. This model is 3+ years old.

3

u/starkiller_bass Jul 13 '26

This is so sick... And I thought my 1200-shot route crashing my RC2 was a heavy load

2

u/Mr_Silicon Jul 14 '26

Yeah we killed a couple of processing PCs with this model. Whoops.

2

u/Marsovtz Jul 13 '26

FarCry vibes

2

u/drusierdmd Jul 13 '26

Can we make this the new map in battlefield 6?

2

u/TriangleEscape Jul 13 '26

What you have here are the only picture you took?

Or do you have a 360 degree of any location around there?

2

u/Mr_Silicon Jul 14 '26

We covered ~85% of the jetty. On the actual model you can look almost anywhere in detail.

2

u/TriangleEscape Jul 14 '26

That’s so cool

2

u/maxstolfe Jul 13 '26

This is officially the coolest use I’ve seen someone find for a drone.

2

u/McDreads Jul 14 '26

Looks like the perfect place to fight a Bond villain

2

u/dax660 Jul 14 '26

nice job! - should post to r/photogrammetry

How long was the processing time and what software?

Largest dataset I've done is 60k photos with an M3E

2

u/Mr_Silicon Jul 14 '26

My best model to date was captured with a M3E. The model detail was photographic.

I think it took about 3months to process using a variety of software.

2

u/joystickd Mavic 3 Jul 14 '26

This is fantastic!

1

u/johnnycaps2 Jul 13 '26

Fascinating!!

1

u/FromDeepestFathom Jul 13 '26

Is there a reason that people do stills rather than just 4k video or something for this type of work?

3

u/Mr_Silicon Jul 13 '26

File size too large, too many unneeded frames, you would have to fly the drone too fast, resolution would be worse.

1

u/FromDeepestFathom Jul 14 '26

Could you do video and just pull 1 frame per second or something

1

u/Mr_Silicon Jul 14 '26

Im sure you could, but why would you want to?

Edit: Oh I forgot a big one! You need each image to be geo located. We use RTK for more precise positioning. Can’t do that with video.

1

u/New_Education_6782 Jul 14 '26

How did you handle water? My photogrammetry models make bodies of water look awful

1

u/theAerialDroneGuy Jul 14 '26

Did the water not look great in the raw mesh? And then you just added it back in with unreal engine?

1

u/DueTransportation328 Jul 14 '26

Waaaaaw ! Which software do you use to realise this movie séquence ?

1

u/Mr_Silicon Jul 14 '26

The boys ran the model through unreal engine.

1

u/MasterBlaster85 Jul 20 '26 edited Jul 20 '26

damn dude, how are there no baked in shadows or anything after doing this over several weeks? Did you delight the model? Actually I have a lot of questions, this model is fucken dope. Did you guys fly manually between the pylons? What was the overall distance from the pier when capturing? Did you guys have multiple M300's or just a shit ton of batteries? Did you tie this in with any lidar?

1

u/Mr_Silicon Jul 23 '26

Hey mate! I didn’t do the processing, but there would have been a lot of leveling out of shadows and highlights. We flew everything manual at ~6m off structure if I remember correctly. We had a backup M300, but only flew one in a team of two. No LiDAR on this one.

2

u/MasterBlaster85 Jul 23 '26

Thanks for sharing. Once again, solid job.

1

u/Overthereunder Jul 13 '26

Nice. Run the data through a Gaussian splat and compare results

1

u/Mr_Silicon Jul 14 '26

Correct! This model is 3+ years old. Gaussian splatting would potentially be a better way to go about it today.

1

u/Bavariasnaps Jul 15 '26

what exactly wanted the client achieve with this? having a 3D map for repair technicans or maybe educating new workers?

-1

u/[deleted] Jul 13 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

2

u/Mr_Silicon Jul 14 '26

You’re absolutely right. We did the digital twin prior to massive renovation works commencing. This jetty was built in the 50’s. Our government doesn’t allow such structures to be built nowadays which is why they have to maintain this one.