A friend asked me to run a survey over an underutilized portion of town that is mostly free standing prairie sitting atop an old closed landfill.  Beautiful space, and even better picture.  This is the culmination of 170 images stitched together.  Unless i'm mistaken though...I can only upload a 1mb file?  We'll see.

This looks great! Out of interest, what software did you use for the stitching?

DJI-PDR Posted at 8-1 06:19
This looks great! Out of interest, what software did you use for the stitching?

I used a free program called Image Composite Editor from Microsoft. It’s discontinued but you can download it still if you Google search it. Pretty intuitive did a good job at stitching things together. There are other free apps as well but I haven’t tried them yet.

DJI-PDR Posted at 8-1 06:19
This looks great! Out of interest, what software did you use for the stitching?

My drone flight pattern was similar to what you see here and I was taking pictures with about 75% overlap. I found that turning on the X overlay with grid system helped me line up my shots. I would take a picture, find a landmark on the top gridmark line and move till I hit it in the middle of the x (or on level with it) and stop to take the next photo.

Fyxsius Posted at 8-1 06:37
My drone flight pattern was similar to what you see here and I was taking pictures with about 75% overlap. I found that turning on the X overlay with grid system helped me line up my shots. I would take a picture, find a landmark on the top gridmark line and move till I hit it in the middle of the x (or on level with it) and stop to take the next photo.[Image]

When my battery was dying, I would take a picture with my phone of the screen, return to home to swap battery, line up with my reference point (a straight line I positioned my grid on) and then moved to the location at the same altitude and view of my phone image.

Fyxsius Posted at 8-1 06:39
When my battery was dying, I would take a picture with my phone if the screen, return to home to swap battery, line up with my reference point (a straight line I positioned my grid on) and then moved to the location at the same altitude and view of my phone image.

Do you know the area covered in the composite image?
How long did it take to do the flying for the task?

Labroides Posted at 8-1 07:01
Do you know the area covered in the composite image?
How long did it take to do the flying for the task?

I did the math based on Google maps (you can see my image in a previous post).  It had a 200 foot scale that I copied and pasted in photoshop to find the scale of the square I drew, but I honestly went further than that square.  The square was 1 sq km, but I did closer to 1.5-2 sq km's.

It took me roughly an hour and 15 minutes to fly it all as it took 2.5 batteries to cover it completely.

Looks great - 2 Mb is the largest file you can get through the DJI filters.

Blériot53 Posted at 8-1 07:54
Looks great - 2 Mb is the largest file you can get through the DJI filters.

Thanks for the head's up as well as the compliments.

Fyxsius Posted at 8-1 08:05
Thanks for the head's up as well as the compliments.

You're welcome

Fyxsius Posted at 8-1 07:04
I did the math based on Google maps (you can see my image in a previous post).  It had a 200 foot scale that I copied and pasted in photoshop to find the scale of the square I drew, but I honestly went further than that square.  The square was 1 sq km, but I did closer to 1.5-2 sq km's.

It took me roughly an hour and 15 minutes to fly it all as it took 2.5 batteries to cover it completely.

Great shot and a lot of work to get it.

Great job of planning and execution. The final appears to be a single image.

Mobilehomer Posted at 8-1 13:07
Great job of planning and execution. The final appears to be a single image.

Thank you. I took the advice of a fixed wing pilot who does this for a living and in all of his cases this is typically how he runs it. Minus us being a drone the size of a bird.

Fyxsius Posted at 8-1 07:04
I did the math based on Google maps (you can see my image in a previous post).  It had a 200 foot scale that I copied and pasted in photoshop to find the scale of the square I drew, but I honestly went further than that square.  The square was 1 sq km, but I did closer to 1.5-2 sq km's.

It took me roughly an hour and 15 minutes to fly it all as it took 2.5 batteries to cover it completely.

You did well to get full coverage flying manually.
It's a lot easier using a mapping app (but you need to use a drone that they work with and the Mini 3 isn't supported yet.

Here's how the mission planning looks in a mapping app, setting a front and side overlap of 70%.
It needs a lot more images that you shot.

That's awesome! A good distance from the earth will make stitching easier. Would be great if you could post a  Fullsize link to Google Drive or Dropbox etc would be awesome to be able to zoom in on those features.  A versatile little drone

Looks great.   

Very well done, Fyxsius! Thanks for sharing this with us.

In order to gain some depth you can use the gimbal at 85 degrees instead of 90 degrees.
On missions and Pix4D is very nice the output.
Also you can set an orbit hyperlapse and you can generate the 3D model of a building.
I have not tried yet with Mini 3, as we map with Autel Evo2 Pro that is the king of mapping, but will give a try.

Geo_Drone Posted at 8-2 03:47
In order to gain some depth you can use the gimbal at 85 degrees instead of 90 degrees.
On missions and Pix4D is very nice the output.
Also you can set an orbit hyperlapse and you can generate the 3D model of a building.

Thank you for the useful advice!  I'll have to give that a try

Labroides Posted at 8-1 18:29
You did well to get full coverage flying manually.
It's a lot easier using a mapping app (but you need to use a drone that they work with and the Mini 3 isn't supported yet.

Oh very neat, yeah that would have made the job so much easier than manual mode XD  Good to know!

Impressive capture!