For you, I was wondering if you had been able to do any aerial 3d mapping, and what to expect?
Ah OK. Aerial Photogrammetry, where people use UAVs and specialist software to automatically apply photos from a range of angles to 3D data is a relatively new thing, and DJ-you-know-who have the most money to throw at making such a system feasible for the general consumer without any specialist 3D skills. And indeed their recently announced mapping solution does just that - takes high res pics and interpolates those such that it can generate not only texture maps, but also a full 3D model and apply those photos to it. Not being a DJ* fan myself I haven't done any mapping or modelling this way so far. But I have done a reasonable amount of photogrammetry on smaller objects, and whilst it definitely has some limitations, and is suited to some types of forms more than others, all the software you need to do it is free or open source, which is helpful. But it is quite a long and complex process at the moment. Think how much effort it is to get a panorama edited and online, and think several orders of magnitude more complex than that !
But IME, buildings are not really suited to the photogrammetry technique - it is much more effective on smaller scale organic type objects. So whenever I have used flying machines to take photos of buildings with the aim of modelling them later, then I am always doing it for the unique views and texture maps we can get from a flying machine, which can get level and central on sections of wall (for example) that we could only take from the ground with extreme perspective distortion, which is a headache to sort out later for texture artists and very much compromises quality. Because I am a modeller who has spent the last 20 years developing advanced skills in that area then I find myself not looking for any way of automatically generating models because if my reference is comprehensive enough I can make the models myself. So with that in mind, the only thing I require form a flight session is comprehensive coverage of all the outer fascias, ideally with some sort of reasonable overlap. So a building that is for example 100 ft long you might split into 5 sections, and take a photo at the same distance from each, working your way round the building until you have the first floor, and then repeating for every floor above that that is different from the one beneath it. I say that because often there is a lot of repetition in buildings, and if you are doing a skyscraper that has 30 floors that are identical you only need to do one or 2 of the floors which would be enough to texture the whole building later in 3D.
Then again, check the lowest example on
this page - yes, it's a very simple house, but the model and textures are pretty **** reasonable. I'd hope the H could capture similar quality to the Inspire used for this. Yet we can also see the limitations in action here - there were no photos from below, so there are several blurry missing texture spots around the model it would have nice to have got filled in form the ground...
Reference-wise, if we are planning to model a building by hand later, then what we need most are distant shots that show all the main details, especially around the roof areas and other bits that wouldn't be visible from the ground or might not appear on plans / blueprints.
I use Cinema 4D as my main DCC app, which doesn't contain any photogrammetry or mapping functionality itself, but is a great place to build the models and do texturing, lighting and rendering.
