Quality report

The report fills in as the model is built: how many photos were aligned, how accurately, how well the model fits the GPS and the LiDAR, and the detail of each output.

How it works

This page is the front end. The heavy work runs on your own PC in the Aerial3D Engine, a small local program that drives two proven open-source photogrammetry engines. Your photos never leave your computer: the page only talks to the engine at 127.0.0.1.

What you get

All map files use the UTM zone of the photos (Southern California: EPSG:32611, WGS 84 / UTM 11N, metres). With "Fit to site LiDAR", elevations follow the LiDAR (NAVD88 for USGS 3DEP data).

Better models from the Mini 5 Pro

• Plan the flight with Kewo's Aerial3D Waypoints (open it) and load the KMZ into DJI Fly's Waypoint Flight.
• Overlap: 75% forward and 70% side for the straight-down grid. Every spot should be in at least 5 photos.
• Add angled photos: a second grid at -45° to -60°, or two orbits around each building or equipment yard. These are what give walls, columns and carport undersides.
• Camera: 12 MP mode, shutter 1/1000 s or faster, fixed white balance, no digital zoom, JPEG. Avoid low sun with long shadows and moving shade.
• Height: 40–60 m above ground for the grid gives about 1.2–1.8 cm per pixel. Lower flights give more detail but need many more photos.
• Accuracy: drone GPS alone is good to about 1–3 m across and worse in height. Fitting to site LiDAR (or adding ground control points) brings it to a few centimetres relative to the survey.
• Leave out 360° panoramas and takeoff/landing shots (the tool does this for you). Phone photos can add wall detail but are off by default.

Ground-level 360 photos

360 photos (for example from an Insta360) are off by default. Turn them on in the Photos tab ("Add the 360 photos"). The engine splits each one into 8 ordinary 90° views around the horizon and aligns those 8 as one camera rig with fixed directions, so they join the drone photos in the same model.

• They add walls, columns, equipment sides and carport undersides; they do not see roofs or the tops of things. Best used together with the drone photos of the same area.
• Take one every 1–2 m along a loop around each building, at a steady height, at the camera's full photo resolution.
• Connect the camera to its phone app so each photo has GPS. Without GPS they are placed only by matching them to the drone photos, which works best when low angled drone photos of the same walls are included.
• The person holding the camera appears in every 360 photo; the engine treats them as noise, but holding the camera on a pole above head height gives cleaner results.

Set up on another PC

1. Download Aerial3D_Setup.zip and unzip it anywhere.
2. Double-click Install Aerial3D.bat. It checks for Python 3.10+ (and installs it for the current user if needed), installs the Python packages (numpy, scipy, pillow, laspy, lazrs, pyproj), and downloads COLMAP and OpenMVS from their official GitHub releases. With an NVIDIA card it picks the faster CUDA versions.
3. Everything goes into %LOCALAPPDATA%\Aerial3D; jobs are written to %USERPROFILE%\Aerial3D\Jobs. No administrator rights, no system changes.
4. Start Aerial3D Engine from the desktop shortcut. It opens this page. Leave its window open while you work; closing it stops processing.
5. Using the page on kewocorp.com: if Chrome asks whether the site may access other apps and devices on your network, choose Allow.

To uninstall, delete %LOCALAPPDATA%\Aerial3D, the desktop shortcut and, if you like, the Jobs folder.

Troubleshooting

About

Kewo Engineering Aerial3D Model, Rev0 261018. Alignment by COLMAP (BSD licence); dense cloud, mesh and texture by OpenMVS (AGPL licence), both run unmodified as separate programs. Base map: Esri World Imagery.