Using camera drones for design

We purchased a DJI drone about a year ago (and Austin got the necessary license…) thinking it would be handy for capturing hard-to-get photos and eye-catching videos of our finished projects. It has helped with our marketing (though we need to be more organized about shooting our finished work!), however we have been using the drone more than we imagined during the design phase for ‘surveying’. Photogrammetry is a fascinating science of photo processing where you can use numerous methodically captured photos of a scene or site and use computer processing to build a three-dimensional computer model of the subject. There are apps and services, such as DroneDeploy and MapsMadeEasy that enable you to program a drone from your phone and it will automate the flight and photography, usually shooting straight down but sometimes oblique shots can add to the detail. We can import the resultant 3D file into SketchUp and develop a design on a terrain that can be accurate to the inch. It doesn’t work well with dense trees, or snow on the ground, but it is a powerful tool to make surveying non-critical sites extremely easy.