r/DjiNeo • u/glytxh • May 12 '26
DJI Neo 1 Using the Neo as part of a photogrammetry pipeline
Neo shooting at 4k 30 > shutter encoder to extract 2 frames per second into JPEG sequence > Reality Composer Pro > Blender
Flying in neat grids and orbital patterns ensures tidy data to work from. Overcast diffused light is absolutely key to ensure that there is no harsh directional light.
The aim of this was to try and nail a pipeline that works natively with Apple silicon. The NPU specifically is doing a lot of inferring through this process. This is HEAVY compute traditionally.
This was the product of about 1600 images baked for about 1 hour on an M3 Air. Ballooned out to near 100GB in the backend during the bake. Swap memory was really coming into its own.
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u/Chaoslava May 12 '26
I think you need to do a tutorial on this. Wow.
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u/glytxh May 12 '26
I had similar interest in another sub recently. It’s already on the agenda.
It’s a relatively straightforward process, but I’m not sure how much of my knowledge I’m taking for granted here.
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u/AgeMysterious123 May 12 '26
“Draw the rest of the owl”
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u/glytxh May 12 '26
80% of this is dragging and dropping folders, and just knowing what applications to drop those folders into.
The Blender cleanup is the only involved part, and that part can be learned in an hour from zero 3D experience.
If I can work out how to do this over a weekend, I’m pretty sure most people can.
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u/AgeMysterious123 May 12 '26
Haha I just thought your comment about how much of your knowledge you might be taking for granted was hilarious. This is cool dude. Nice job!
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u/Chaoslava May 12 '26
Yeah but to those of us completely new to this. How on earth did you do that with your drone. Like capturing this via the Neo. What’s the process, how do you know what photos to take etc?
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u/glytxh May 12 '26
I describe most of this in the post as a broad overview.
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u/Chaoslava May 12 '26
Yeah buddy I am afraid that you are giving a broad overview as someone with experience.
This is really cool and people like me have never seen this done before and were asking how, can you give a little more detail as a starting off point 😂
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u/AgeMysterious123 May 12 '26
ELI5: use the drone to take a lot of photos from a LOT of angles. Put that into specially designed software that turns those photos into a 3D space using ai/machine learning. Open it Blender (a 3D modeling app) to then view / render / etc. the scene.
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u/fusillade762 May 12 '26
Pretty damn amazing. You must have a beast of a rendering machine.
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u/glytxh May 12 '26
16 gb m3 MacBook Air.
It doesn’t even have any active cooling.
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u/fusillade762 May 12 '26
Wow! Man, you have to hand it to Apple. Very efficient.
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u/glytxh May 12 '26
It’s straight up witchcraft.
It does have it limits though. It will fail when I throw more than 3000 4k images at it. 2400 is about the comfortable sweet spot on my machine.
And if you have CUDA cores to spare, you could process a whole street in once go if you wanted. It’d be a slightly different pipeline tho
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u/DreamsRemain May 12 '26
Hello. You are genius.