Workflow

Most 3D terrain data from OS or similar sources are available in flat colorless detail-less blocks only, and satellite imagery is way too low-res to possess any effect. At least, people who you’ll access publicly. These options are great for quickly mapping out the urban or rural environments around your model, but drastically limit options and capabilities when preparing client presentation renders.

This is where drones could also be very useful. you’ll get into really speedy context-building without having to sacrifice photorealism. the thought is predicated upon taking many photos of the world with a drone with a high-res camera, then using those photos to match and render the 3D context in SketchUp.

Incidentally, drones are already utilized in construction in a similar manner. They fly them around the site, especially just in case of huge or tall projects, to ascertain the progress and to examine difficult-to-reach spots. Now we will, and will, use an identical idea in SketchUp 3D context modeling.

Of course, to use this tactic in architecture design and visualization, you would like some help. A testing team of Lumion used a contemporary drone and drone-to-3D capture software and designed a workflow that might be easy for many architects. Not only that, it’ll be time-saving too – all the capture and fitting work for a standard-sized project (let’s say, 300 by 300 meters) is often finished during a day.

The team used a drone device named DJI Mavic Air. it’s but a kilogram in weight and may speedily fly for 20 minutes (or, 10 kilometers) on a full charge. While doing that, it can stream 4k videos and 12k photos! It cost them only $800, so, seeing the return, it’s cost-efficient also. Combined with a typical 10-inch tablet (with enough storage), this drone is often an excellent modern surveyor.

But taking random pictures darting around the site isn’t only clueless, it’s also inefficient. you would like to plan carefully about where the drone should pause, look in what direction, and take the image. Pre-planning that much, and flying the drone thereupon quite precision isn’t normal for us standard architects, yeah? Yes, the testing team thought that after only one try, they opted for Drone Harmony.

What is Drone Harmony?

It is an app utilized in the tablet mentioned above, and what it does it’s fantastic. you’ll define the world of interest on the local map, and therefore the app automatically calculates the flight path of the drone. Not only that, while it flies the drone on the precise path, it continuously captures images of the world. Each picture will have a 60% overlap with the previous, so you’re bound to get full coverage. Also, you’re getting to need that overlap to create the complete 3D map.

But what about the angle? It’s simple, just repeat the run with the camera tilted in different directions till you’ve got pictures of each solid object therein area from every conceivable direction. meaning five runs with 5 different angles. Each of those runs for a 300x300m area would take around ten minutes. Adding charging time, which will be finished in under half each day.

Now that you simply got all the visual information about your area, you would like to align and join the pictures to create one giant picture – and make a 3D model out of it, and add textures. You can, of course, do that by hand, with hour after hour of back-breaking work – but why bother once you have RealityCapture? This handy tool takes all of your area photos, joins them up to form a full photo of the world, and makes an in-depth 3D model out of it painted with textures to boot!

Granted, after importing the photographs and getting it configured for the project, the RealityCapture software would take a couple of hours on a moderately decent machine – but the result’s oh so worth it!

Now all you’ve got to try to do the next day is to import the model into SketchUp, prune and comb out unimportant details nobody will see (to make the model lighter and simpler), and send it to a renderer like Lumion. For those with longer, plow ahead and decorate the place with trees, people, and cars – hell, put the Batmobile within the middle of it for all we care – then catch on rendering.

Wrapping

There you go, all done! For video presentations, you’ll add scenes within the SketchUp model and obtain it animated also. LiveSync will are available very handy for that!

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