3DR Announces Partnership with Esri; Site Scan Support for Esri Drone2Map

[franknitty69]

3DR collaborates with Esri to deliver best-in-class solution for aerial data capture and analytics.

Today at the Esri User Conference, 3DR announced that we have teamed up with the world’s leading provider of GIS solutions to seamlessly integrate 3DR’s Site Scan with Esri Drone2Map. Designed for the field professional, Site Scan is an intuitive, powerful and open aerial data capture and analytics platform that delivers an end-to-end solution ready-made for existing mapping and survey workflows. With Site Scan and Drone2Map, Esri customers can safely, quickly and easily conduct surveys with the Solo® smart drone and effortlessly deliver that data to ArcGIS® and ArcGIS Online.

3DR® Announces Partnership with Esri®; Site Scan™ Support for Esri Drone2Map™ — 3DR News

 

[Maddog]

Frank, aren't there less expensive options for software that does the same thing?

 

[franknitty69]

Frank, aren't there less expensive options for software that does the same thing?

yes there are cheaper options, but they won't do everything that site scan does. the equivalent to SiteScan would be DroneDeploy Premier with a Phantom 4 or Inspire1. DD Premier is $499 per month.

SiteScan is taking all of the different stages of mapping that would normally be a multitude of manual processes and multiple applications and streamlining it into a single workflow. this makes the mapping process simpler, faster and more flexible especially if you use other autodesk products due to the a360 integration.

mapping can be performed more cheaply using say Mission Planner and a cheaper cloud based option like DDMS Pro. but you will have to manually geotag your images and you will have limitations such as the max number of images your survey can contain, the max no of surveys that can be processed simultaneously, the max no of surveys that can be processed per month, lower resolution, limited export options and whether it supports gcp's or not.

as an example i just ran a 257 image job through both DD and DDMS. DD took about 11 hours and DDMS took 19 hours. both were using the lower level plans which are slower than the higher level plans but this is a perfect example. If i needed the orthos turned around in a day, i wouldn't be able to to it with free plans or the cheaper cloud based plans. i would need the more expensive plans or Pix4d mapper pro which is $350 per month and i would need a very, very good computer.

 

[Pedals2Paddles]

I recently did several using Pix4D and DroneDeploy. All were roughly 80- 130 images. Pix4D chewed on just those small jobs for 4-6 hours each on my Surface with an i7 and no graphics processor to help. And that as with the processor cranking away at nearly 100% and use all my GBs of RAM. Free DroneDeploy took about the same time, but the results were not as pretty as Pix4D (pro trial).

This stuff is extremely time consuming, extremely resource intensive, and therefore extremely expensive. There is no "cheap and easy" way to do it.

 

[Jubalr]

I've had much better results from Agisoft Photoscan Pro. It is by far the fastest of anything I've tested. It will generate an Orthomosaic in record time. I just did a bean field with a Mapir camera that consisted of 177 images (16mp) and the Ortho was generated in about 35min. The initial pairing process was 4 minutes. It is not only faster, but easier to use than Pix4D. The .Tif image of the ortho was about 700mb if I remember correctly. My system is an Area 51 R2 with 32gb and 3 SSD drives. Certainly not one of the fastest machines, but it does a good job for me. For online services, I like DroneDeploy the best so far that I have used and it's ability to fine tune NDVI scans.

 

[Maddog]

yes there are cheaper options, but they won't do everything that site scan does. the equivalent to SiteScan would be DroneDeploy Premier with a Phantom 4 or Inspire1. DD Premier is $499 per month.

SiteScan is taking all of the different stages of mapping that would normally be a multitude of manual processes and multiple applications and streamlining it into a single workflow. this makes the mapping process simpler, faster and more flexible especially if you use other autodesk products due to the a360 integration.

mapping can be performed more cheaply using say Mission Planner and a cheaper cloud based option like DDMS Pro. but you will have to manually geotag your images and you will have limitations such as the max number of images your survey can contain, the max no of surveys that can be processed simultaneously, the max no of surveys that can be processed per month, lower resolution, limited export options and whether it supports gcp's or not.

as an example i just ran a 257 image job through both DD and DDMS. DD took about 11 hours and DDMS took 19 hours. both were using the lower level plans which are slower than the higher level plans but this is a perfect example. If i needed the orthos turned around in a day, i wouldn't be able to to it with free plans or the cheaper cloud based plans. i would need the more expensive plans or Pix4d mapper pro which is $350 per month and i would need a very, very good computer.

So would the process be faster with Sitescan, or do you still need to use something like DD?

 

[franknitty69]

So would the process be faster with Sitescan, or do you still need to use something like DD?

sitescan uses recap360 for its online processing. i tried recap360 by itself and it was faster than DD and DDMS. i did a 200 image job and it took about 4 hours. my current issue with recap360 is it has a max image limit of 250 per job. i don't know if it will be lifted if you have a sitescan license or not.

 

[Maddog]

sitescan uses recap360 for its online processing. i tried recap360 by itself and it was faster than DD and DDMS. i did a 200 image job and it took about 4 hours. my current issue with recap360 is it has a max image limit of 250 per job. i don't know if it will be lifted if you have a sitescan license or not.

Ok, thanks. Do these programs do the "rendering" on your computer or "in the cloud"?

 

[franknitty69]

Ok, thanks. Do these programs do the "rendering" on your computer or "in the cloud"?

all in the cloud. all you have to do is upload the geotagged images and wait.

there are some desktop apps such as pix4d mapper and agisoft photoscan.

 

[Maddog]

all in the cloud. all you have to do is upload the geotagged images and wait.

there are some desktop apps such as pix4d mapper and agisoft photoscan.

Ok, I wondered where the "long" processing time was occurring.

 

[Dandy James]

Thanks everyone for your studied input...I've been struggling to get Autodesk ReMake onto my new Toshiba I7 16GB/NVIDIA 4GB/GTX...some problems on the 15inch screen but ReMake team very responsive in helping...text and icons still too small to read for an old dude like me...but they're working on it...

sitescan uses recap360 for its online processing. i tried recap360 by itself and it was faster than DD and DDMS. i did a 200 image job and it took about 4 hours. my current issue with recap360 is it has a max image limit of 250 per job. i don't know if it will be lifted if you have a sitescan license or not.

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