[Jonathan]

I did my first orthomosaic when I was working for an oil & gas company some years back. They bought a drone to get aerial imagery of ‘unplanned release’ cleanups and other field activities. Since I had flown drones overseas, I became their ‘drone guy.’

After doing that for a couple of weeks, they asked if there was anything else the drone could do so I decided to get a trial version of Pix4d and put together an ortho of the 30 or so wells across one of their fields. They really liked that so I decided to start doing some basic 3D models of each wellsite.

The first few were pretty rough as I learned about what (and how many)photos to take, proper overlap, and how to create/use good tie points (I didn’t have the best luck with full auto tie points).

I remember trying to make a programmatic model using Pix4d running on a Surface 3…needless to say, it ended up overheating and crashing. This was way before I understood the computational power necessary to crunch all those triangles.

Things have come a long way 🙂