Drone Photos Without a Drone

September 25, 2022 Gary 1 Comment

Last year when we were in Tucson, staying at the Lazy Days KOA, I wanted to take a decent photo of our campsite. The best shot would have been from a drone, but I didn’t think the KOA would allow me to fly my drone there. Not to mention that campground is in the airspace of a commercial airport and two(!) military airbases. There really was no chance of getting permission to fly a drone there!

So, what to do? I did some searching, and found photos that looked like photos from a drone that were taken without a drone. How did they do it?

One person that had some pretty interesting photos had taken the photos with a 10′ “Selfie” stick. That’s right, 10 feet! That sounded great to me, so I purchased one. Click here to get your own from Amazon (this is an affiliate link).

OK, it’s not really 10 feet. It’s actually 3 meters, or about 9.8 feet. It’s a carbon fiber pole that extends in sections, so you don’t have to extend it to the full 3 meters. When collapsed it’s only about ~18″ long.

When holding this pole up over my head, the camera is about 16′ above ground. Perfect for many photos.

I attached my GoPro to the end of the pole and used my cell phone to control the camera. I could see what the camera was seeing through my phone, and snap the shot (or shoot a video). It takes a little practice to hold the pole steady and aim it where you want.

The pole seems to be made well. It locks into position and stays there until you want to collapse it (a slight twist at each section releases it).

Using this pole, I was able to get some pretty nice shots of our KOA campsite, as seen below.

Photogrammetry, Photography

3D Model of Ponderosa Pine Tree Bark

July 25, 2022 Gary 2 Comments

Here is my latest diversion. This is the bark of a Ponderosa pine tree near Camp Sherman, Oregon. I shot 26 photos with my Pixel 5a cell phone, then processed the photos with WebODM into a 3D model.

I did further processing in Blender to eliminate a few extraneous bits and then created an animation of the model.

Below is the animation I created using Blender. Click on the image to start the video, click “f” to view it full screen. Press “f” again to exit full screen mode (I suggest viewing it in full screen to really see it):

This model can also be seen in Sketchfab, a 3D viewer. Click on the image below, and after the model loads, click and drag to see it in 3D. Same as for the animation, press “f” to view it full screen and “f” again (or escape) to exit full screen mode:

Drone, Photogrammetry, Photography

Model of my Deck

June 27, 2022 Gary 1 Comment

I entered the following in the WebODM (Open Drone Map) forum. Some of it is a bit technical for this blog, but thought it might be interesting to some people.

Just for fun, and to learn more about WebODM and Blender, I flew my DJI Mini 2 drone around my deck to create a model. My deck has trees on 3 sides of it and overhanging it. Flying between the tree branches to get some of the shots was a bit challenging. There was a bit of a pucker factor a few times when flying inches below a branch and the drone started drifting upwards! (The Mini 2 has only forward and downward sensors, which is good here – I could never have flown that close to the trees if there were active sensors the other directions.)

I shot 142 images and processed those and saw some areas that didn’t seem to have adequate coverage. So I shot another 49 images to fill in some areas. That improved the places I concentrated on, but it seemed that some other areas decreased in quality. The glass railing and adjacent sunroom windows and doors caused some oddities, as expected. One thing I found odd is that the deck and other items seem to be “reflected” in the undersides of the tree branches.

My processing system is Windows 10 Pro on a laptop with 64GB of RAM. I initially processed this using Docker/WebODM, but ran out of memory when I increased pc-quality to ultra. I then processed it in Windows native WebODM, and it processed in 24+ hours. The WebODM timer showed 36 minutes, so I don’t have accurate information…

I postprocessed this with Blender to clean up some of the extraneous parts of the model, but purposefully left most of the trees. To get the upload files under the 100MB limit for the free Sketchfab account, I decimated the model in Blender to 70% and converted the PNG files to JPG.

Processing parameters:

debug: true, mesh-octree-depth: 13, mesh-size: 1000000, min-num-features: 30000, pc-quality: ultra, resize-to: -1, verbose: true

Click on the image below to activate the model. Use your mouse buttons to change the view, and your scroll wheel to zoom in and out. Type “F”, or click the double-ended arrow in the lower right, to open it in full screen. (I highly recommend viewing it in full screen.)