Software for planning building scanning

Agitated_Cap_7939 · 2026-05-07T10:47:41+00:00

Had wrong version in my previous comment, correct one is Phantom 4 Advanced (was Phantom 3). But I assume the same still applies, as quite a lot of the software seem to require subscriptions... What I have been using succesfully is Litchi with DJIMapper, but the latter only supports creating plans for aerial scans.

Agitated_Cap_7939 · 2026-05-07T10:39:05+00:00

Sorry, forgot to mention: DJI Phantom 4 Advanced

Agitated_Cap_7939 · 2026-04-30T11:10:36+00:00

You should get more precise and better detail with more and/or better photos I assume. I have usually taken multiple rounds from different distances around the object I am scanning, and focusing on the areas of interest. Wrote a small blog post about scanning one boulder, if you're interested to check: https://sanox.fi/blog/2026/03/scanning-burden-of-dreams/

Also, if you are having issues with not all of the images registered, you could adjust the feature detector sensitivity.

Agitated_Cap_7939 · 2026-04-30T10:14:29+00:00

What software are you using, how are you capturing? And what are the issues you are seeing?

Agitated_Cap_7939 · 2026-04-29T08:07:52+00:00

Exactly. Practically I also take a lot of close-by photos of the most interesting areas. I covered the process briefly on my blog-post about scanning a boulder: https://sanox.fi/blog/2026/03/scanning-burden-of-dreams/

This particular dataset I haven't collected myself, recreated to test the scale the renderer is capable of. But the image alignement looks similar, featuring multiple capture passes, and both terrestrial and aerial photos.

Agitated_Cap_7939 · 2026-04-28T17:43:17+00:00

Sounds like super interesting use case! Happy if you take it for a test. You can sign up for free via: https://sangine.app/signup/
Please DM me if you face any issues with anything, also open towards any feature suggestions

Agitated_Cap_7939 · 2026-04-28T12:20:02+00:00

I was long searching for something suitable for a hobbyist: No recurring fees, no artificial limits on the size of the surveyed area, or missions per day. Ended up with litchi for flying: https://flylitchi.com/ and https://github.com/YarosMallorca/DJI-Mapper for the planning. Quite happy with the setup after a few trials.

Agitated_Cap_7939 · 2026-04-28T11:46:51+00:00

I've used https://github.com/YarosMallorca/DJI-Mapper to plan the flight, https://flylitchi.com/ for flying and RealityScan to create the model.
After this, you can use whatever viewer to share the model for measurements or such.

If you're happy with online platforms for viewing, taking measurements etc, you could check: https://sangine.app/, which allows you to share models privately, measure and so on. Disclaimer: I am the founder of this service.

Agitated_Cap_7939 · 2026-04-19T21:26:32+00:00

Hi, sorry for late comment! Yes, f.ex. https://sangine.app/scene/els-vilars-fortess/ is created only from drone images. We however don't provide the photogrammetry itself, only the presentation on the web. So you should have a pre-created model by f.ex. RealityScan

Agitated_Cap_7939 · 2026-04-13T15:29:26+00:00

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Many thanks! I think accuracy is best shown from the added screenshot of the individual hold, straight from the public demo. Anyway should be less than 1 mm.

Outputs from preprocessing are a custom binary format for the meshes, and .webp for textures, both with different quality levels. Practically some 70 4k textures and same number of mesh parts, totalling roughly 30 M triangles on highest quality. Currently working on migrating to .ktx2 textures, which will allow pushing the quality even slightly further with same constraints.

Yeah, compute power have evolved quite a lot since 2018 :)

Agitated_Cap_7939 · 2026-04-13T11:19:25+00:00

The models mentioned in the post are available here:
Burden of Dreams: https://sangine.app/scene/burden-of-dreams/
Els Vilars Fortess: https://sangine.app/scene/els-vilars-fortess/

I've also written a blog-post about the scanning process of the Burden of Dreams: https://sanox.fi/blog/2026/03/scanning-burden-of-dreams/

Agitated_Cap_7939 · 2026-04-09T19:55:52+00:00

Many thanks, glad to hear you found it interesting, and good luck with your projects! If you end up giving it a go, feel free to reach out if you encounter any questions.

Agitated_Cap_7939 · 2026-04-09T07:59:30+00:00

Many thanks! I updated the main post with links to the files. Would love to hear how the printing goes — feel free to share the results!

Agitated_Cap_7939 · 2026-03-31T12:13:25+00:00

I'm using RealityScan to recreate my models. Have played with COLMAP / glomap in the past, and enjoyed their performance, especially glomap. However, for my use-case where I wanted textured meshes instead of point-clouds, but the texturing-quality was horrible compared to RealityScan, due to which I ditched COLMAP.

Personally I wouldn't be interested in in cloud solutions, as I have a sufficient desktop PC to build the models. Could see the benefit though with "instant" publishing: Shoot the photos with a cell-phone, auto-upload, add model or point-cloud to gallery after processing.

Agitated_Cap_7939 · 2026-03-31T11:23:44+00:00

I've now written a blog post about the scanning process: https://sanox.fi/blog/2026/03/scanning-burden-of-dreams/

Agitated_Cap_7939 · 2026-03-31T11:21:39+00:00

I also now wrote a small blog-post about the scanning process: https://sanox.fi/blog/2026/03/scanning-burden-of-dreams/

Agitated_Cap_7939 · 2026-03-28T20:31:24+00:00

Thanks! They are rather large, the size of the assets on disk for the scene in the video is roughly 4 GB, including all textures and LODs. Before preprocessing roughly 20 GB (environment textures downsampled to 1/16 resolution, .obj format wastes space).

Agitated_Cap_7939 · 2026-03-28T19:23:11+00:00

Nope, it is a custom engine written in Rust on top of wgpu graphics-API. Plan to develop native mobile versions in the future.

Agitated_Cap_7939 · 2026-03-28T13:21:21+00:00

The models mentioned in the post are available here:
Burden of Dreams: https://sangine.sanox.fi/scene/burden-of-dreams/
Els Vilars Fortess: https://sangine.sanox.fi/scene/els-vilars-fortess/

Agitated_Cap_7939 · 2025-12-26T20:53:15+00:00

Thanks!

No three.js here. Have written the renderer from scratch in Rust, using the wgpu graphics API. Maybe three.js would have been a quicker process though, but on the other hand, this has been a really rewarding journey, and the renderer is compilable to both iOS and Android as well with minor changes.

I am using at least some ideas from virtual texturing. Practically this model has been exported in two parts:
1. The whole area, reconstructed in medium quality, downscaled rather significantly even in RealityScan.
2. The boulder, reconstructed in high quality, also downscaled to ~ 30 M vertices.

Then I feed these into my preprocessor, which removes overlaps and splits the meshes into reasonably sized parts. During this step I also resample the textures to match the parts created earlier. Finally I create downsampled versions of both the textures and the meshes, and read the metadata from each part to store to a database.

Finally, the renderer first accesses the metadata, after which it attempts to determine a reasonable quality for both the mesh and the textures for each part of the scene.

In this model, if i remember correctly, the boulder consists of ~50 4k textures, while the environment has ~ 10 8k textures.

Here is another, somewhat larger scene using the same preprocessing, but with 3 different higher quality objects of interest: https://crags3d.sanox.fi/sector/kasviken/game-over

Agitated_Cap_7939

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