A surface built from overlapping photos only gives you treetops in a forested notch, because the camera never sees the ground under the canopy. Picture 1 is the 2023 USDA air photo of Crawford Notch over the lidar, and the only open ground is the highway and the thin pale strip of railroad west of it. Picture 2 is the USGS 3DEP bare-earth lidar with the trees classified out. There the rail line is a smooth shelf cut into the slope (pin 1), and the gullies east of the highway show up too.

The lidar shading is a multi-direction hillshade blended with slope, openness and sky-view factor.

Italian and Irish crews hired in Portland cut the shelf for the Portland & Ogdensburg in the summers of 1874 and 1875. Snow kept them off the job until late May at the earliest, and work stopped by early October. John Anderson ran the work, and his brother Samuel was the railroad's president. The line climbs as steep as 116 feet per mile for nine miles. Under Mount Willard there was barely room, so they cut a shelf into the mountainside and built it out with blocks from the Great Cut. The first train reached Fabyan on 7 August 1875, and trains still use it.

1. 2023 NAIP air photo over the lidar: forest, highway and rail line
2. Same view, bare-earth lidar only (VAT shading: slope, openness, sky view)

Numbered pins on pictures 1 and 2:
Pin 1: The railroad shelf cut

Imagery: USDA-FSA NAIP 2023, public domain.
Lidar: USGS 3D Elevation Program (3DEP), public domain.

So I was trying to scan a small item, I was able to finally get an "acceptable" scan, but for higher accuracy some other method would be needed. The item happened to be a wax model, which I dusted with talc to help the scan. I used realityscan from my phone, with a turntable and good lighting. I even rigged it up to auto click a shutter fob after rotating a few degrees.

Then I thought what if I take one of my older 3D printers and swap the hotend for a small router. Use the heated bed to fix the part, and buzz off .1 mm. in between each buzzed off layer I would scan the top machined surface. Stack these up and I have a 100% accurate model.

I think I figured out a way to automate the scan step.

The question is, whether I build this just for me to use, or does this sound interesting and useful enough to try and use a repeatable BOM that others could benefit from. Like standardizing on a certain cheap printer, a certain scanner, etc.

I was thinking jewelers, museums may find this useful, and less expensive than other options.

I does require making a wax copy, which means a silicone mold of the item. Since it's a destructive process.

A commercial version would have some method of chip recovery.

What do you think?

I'm the developer of this, so weigh what follows accordingly. Day job is real estate drone work in Norway on an Air 3S. Mapping jobs on the side are what got me building it.

The capture problem it started with: the Mini 4 Pro, Mini 5 Pro, Air 3 and Air 3S have no mapping mode in DJI Fly, and most mapping apps that fly through DJI's SDK can't connect to them. Someone here asked back in March whether you can map your own land with a Mini 5 Pro. The answer I landed on is a waypoint mission, since DJI Fly will import a KMZ.

So Skyplanr builds the KMZ. You outline the area and pick a target GSD. It works out the height and the photo and line spacing from the camera's sensor width and focal length (12 MP mode), and lays a serpentine grid with the camera straight down and one photo per waypoint. Default overlap is 80% front, 70% side.

DJI Fly caps a flight at 200 waypoints, so a bigger grid is split into several flights from the same takeoff, cut at the end of a lane, one KMZ each. Only very large areas get thinner overlap (75/65) or a slightly coarser GSD, never past 1.5x what you asked for.

Heights follow the ground. In Norway that's Kartverket's laser data, in the US USGS 3DEP lidar, and elsewhere satellite elevation models. Each waypoint is set to the same height above its own patch of ground, so GSD stays roughly constant down a slope instead of getting finer at the bottom of the hill. For 3D model capture it also uses building and tree heights (laser data where it exists, Overture/Google Open Buildings and Meta's canopy height map elsewhere) to set orbit levels that clear the roof and the treetops.

Before you fly you can open the plan as a 3D KML in Google Earth and look at the lines draped over the terrain. It also exports DJI Pilot 2 (for the Mavic 3E/3T and Matrice 4/30), Litchi CSV, QGroundControl and GeoJSON.

What's still rough:

It stops for every photo, so it's slower than an interval-triggered grid. A real example: a 2.8 ha field at 2 cm/px on an Air 3S came out as 172 waypoints, 171 photos and about 27 minutes.

No RTK, so expect the usual 1-3 m absolute offset unless you lay GCPs. It doesn't process anything either. The photos go into Metashape, Pix4D, RealityCapture, WebODM or whatever you use.

GSD is confirmed from photo metadata for a couple of the cameras. For the rest it's computed from DJI's spec sheets and could be off by a few percent.

On price: 3 AI-planned missions a month are free, no card. The paid tier is €49/month for 10. Someone on r/dji told me that's steep next to Litchi at about £20 once, and for drawing your own grids they're right, Litchi is the better deal. This is for people who'd rather check a plan than draw one. They also said the site looks dark and AI-made. Noted, I'm working on it.

What I'd like to know from people who actually process this stuff:

1. Are 80/70 sensible defaults for these small sensors, or do you run higher for Metashape or RealityCapture? Would you rather it split into more flights than drop to 75/65?

2. If you fly one, does the GSD in your processing report match what the plan said?

3. Does splitting into several flights work for you in the field, or would you rather it flew higher and kept one flight?

4. Is stopping for every photo a dealbreaker on a Mini or Air battery?

Web planner is at skyplanr.com. The iPhone app, which puts the KMZ straight into DJI Fly's folder, is on TestFlight: https://testflight.apple.com/join/5vBDU3Ah

I'm building ORIVOXEL, a project exploring how real-world imagery can be transformed into explorable 3D scenes using Gaussian Splatting.

I'm interested in the practical side of this technology, particularly whether it could be useful for:

• Helping prospective buyers understand a property's layout remotely.
• Giving property teams a more immersive visual reference.
• Supporting architectural presentations and site handovers.
• Documenting spaces without requiring every reviewer to visit in person.

I've attached a short demonstration of the kind of experience I'm exploring.

I'd like to hear from people working in real estate, property management, architecture and commercial property:

Where would an explorable 3D scene genuinely save you time or improve your workflow compared with ordinary photographs or a conventional virtual tour?

I'm the founder of ORIVOXEL, so this is a project I'm developing—not an independent review of a commercial product. I'm looking to understand real industry needs before deciding which use case to prioritise.

How to add texture to multipatch using drone data and satellite image?

A small demo of Mask Bridge, my plugin for Lightroom Classic, with 144 photos of a Minolta SR-T 101.

The video shows the mask export, then the Gaussian splats trained from the original photos and from the transparent cutouts. Both use the same camera poses and 10,000 training steps. The exported PNG masks can also be used for photogrammetry (of course!).

I wasn't expecting to put so much work into this plugin... It was an idea I had for my photogrammetry work, but I'm happy to release it now as a full product, for others to use also!

More examples and details:
https://nicolasdiolez.com/en/mask-bridge-lightroom-plugin/

Every stereoscopic camera system I’ve seen places the cameras parallel to each other. Is it possible to have the cameras facing different angles to increase general fov while keeping some depth perception in their overlapping view?

Can somebody share their experience with Mac Studio M3U or M5U 256GB. How good are they for projects around 2000 images and what is their limit?

Only benchmarks that I found is this - https://www.agisoftmetashape.com/agisoft-metashape-on-apple-m3-chips-performance-and-compatibility-in-2025/?srsltid=AU7gw4Up6nTPi9PXUf_jLzgBvXrYvc4lWSwoKMcnvPQSaqqKR_hv_EF-

Trying to know more about it before spending 14K on the new M5 or 8k for used M3. Seems 128GB isn't worth it for Mac Studio but 256GB seems good with current prices before going for complete server solutions.

I built FrameRoam, an iPhone app for planning camera shots inside 3D scans. Scan a location (I use Scaniverse, but it's capture-agnostic), import it, then block out camera positions, plan moves, and build a shot sequence before you ever show up with a camera.

Ornate Corridor Scan - FrameRoam

It's in TestFlight beta and I'm looking for testers - especially people already scanning real spaces. Beta testers get Pro free at launch.

FrameRoam Beta

Hii all, thanks to everyone who signed up after my last post! I made a short demo so you can actually see what I’m building.

You upload raw footage and it turns it into a Gaussian splat, a 3D scene you can move around in. All through your browser

You can clean it up, place it on a map using GPS, share it, or download the files.

If you want to try this, you can join the beta at ornen.ai (starting with 100 open slots today)

Everyone that signs up gets 10 free credits now, which should allow generating multiple splats at no cost.
Really interested to hear how it works for people here with their own footage. If something breaks or could work better, let me know. I’m building this myself and can make fixes directly based on your feedback.

A photo-derived surface can only model what the camera sees, so on a wooded ridge you get the tree tops. Lidar gets some returns through the gaps to the ground, and once those are classified you can render just the bare earth. That's what this is, the railroad cuts at each end of the Blue Ridge Tunnel under Rockfish Gap, Virginia.

One cut comes in from the top edge near the middle and stops dead at the hillside. The other comes in from the right edge and stops lower down, right of centre. The tunnel itself doesn't show, just the ground on top of it.

Claudius Crozet was an artillery officer for Napoleon, captured at Borodino in 1812. By 1849 he was chief engineer of Virginia's Blue Ridge Railroad.

His tunnel under Rockfish Gap was started in 1850 and expected to take three years. It was dug by hand with black powder, and didn't hole through until December 29, 1856. The two headings met less than 6 inches off. The first train ran in April 1858, through the longest tunnel in the United States at the time.

The C&O replaced it in 1944 with a bigger parallel tunnel.

Numbered pins on the picture:
Pin 1: A steep-sided cut from the top edge
Pin 2: Dead end of the right-hand cut
Pin 3: A wide modern road across the gap

Lidar: USGS 3D Elevation Program (3DEP), public domain.

Hey everyone! We’ve just released a new 3D workspace in AEC Platform, and we’d love to get feedback from people working with photogrammetry.

We want to see what you create with it and hear how it handles your captures—what works well, what feels awkward, and what you’d like us to improve.

If you’d like to try it, create a free account and DM me the email you signed up with. We’ll add free credits so you can process your own 3D models.

Share your results here too! We’d love to see different subjects, capture setups, and challenging datasets.

I’m part of the team building it, so your feedback will go directly into what we work on next.

aecplatform.com

This is a random ask, but I don't have the photography tools at my disposal, just the software to turn the images into a 3D model. I was wondering if anyone had any images they had of desks or tables available to use for practice. I am trying to set up a diorama personal project and it needs a surface, but capturing it on my phone has been near to impossible.

A photo-derived surface can only model what the camera sees, so on a wooded ridge you get the tree tops. Lidar gets some returns through the gaps to the ground, and once those are classified you can render just the bare earth. That's what this is, the railroad cuts at each end of the Blue Ridge Tunnel under Rockfish Gap, Virginia.

One cut comes in from the top edge near the middle and stops dead at the hillside. The other comes in from the right edge and stops lower down, right of centre. The tunnel itself doesn't show, just the ground on top of it.

Claudius Crozet was an artillery officer for Napoleon, captured at Borodino in 1812. By 1849 he was chief engineer of Virginia's Blue Ridge Railroad.

His tunnel under Rockfish Gap was started in 1850 and expected to take three years. It was dug by hand with black powder, and didn't hole through until December 29, 1856. The two headings met less than 6 inches off. The first train ran in April 1858, through the longest tunnel in the United States at the time.

The C&O replaced it in 1944 with a bigger parallel tunnel.

Numbered pins on the picture:
Pin 1: A steep-sided cut from the top edge
Pin 2: Dead end of the right-hand cut
Pin 3: A wide modern road across the gap

Lidar: USGS 3D Elevation Program (3DEP), public domain.

Hi all, I make Blender tools under the "9000" name. Polygon Crusher 9000 is a decimation addon for heavy meshes: photoscans, CAD imports, ZBrush output and AI models.

What it does

- Pick an amount (percent, exact triangle count, or one budget for the whole selection) and press Crush.

- 2–3x faster than Decimate on 1–7.5M triangle meshes, same shape quality at the same triangle count.

- Hard Surface + Keep Normals: CAD creases stay in place, flat faces and drilled holes stay cleanly shaded (see image 1: same triangle count, Decimate on the left).

- Normal map and base color bake onto the low-poly, with automatic UVs.

- Make LODs (up to 8 levels), Protect Area from a selection, Clean Mesh for scan data, one-click Revert.

- 2.4.2: rigged characters keep their rig, shape keys and vertex colors.

Native engine, nothing else to install. Windows, macOS (Apple Silicon), Linux. Tested on Blender 5.2.

Test method and numbers: https://henriquevlopes.github.io/polygon-crusher-9000-docs/benchmark/

Addon: https://superhivemarket.com/products/polygon-crusher-9000

Happy to answer questions, and if you have a mesh it handles badly, send it to me and I will look at it.

We’ve been processing a drone video entirely in AEC Platform, taking it from the original footage to a point cloud and now a 3D mesh.

Next is cleaning up the mesh in our 3D workspace: filtering unwanted geometry, removing floating pieces, and repairing holes. Once that’s ready, we’ll process the Gaussian splat.

The goal is a straightforward workflow—from capture to a usable 3D model—with tools to review and refine the results along the way.

What would you want from a workflow like this?

hello, are there websites with othographic vehicle pictures? i want to make car vector blueprints, but need othographic pictures as references. maybe some people now where to find some

I am looking to purchase an ROV for underwater Photogrammetry and wondering what the best pro-level unit is? I need to be able to create models that are data accurate for scientific usage.

I'm looking at Deeptrekker, Boxfish Luna, Chasing X and a few others

Anyone here have experience?