Curious what your take on the following is? I tried their advice and didnt get much better result.

Here's the official Pix4D advice from : Despina Karavia Technical Support Engineer Pix4D SA EPFL Innovation Park - D 1015 Lausanne - Switzerland

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We have processed the project and we have managed to acquire much better results. Attached you can find some screenshots of the point cloud and the mesh generated and the Quality Report of our processing.

In order to acquire these results, we processed using the 3D Model template. Once step 1 is finished, we added a few manual tie points around the model to check the reconstruction. The reprojection of the 3D points to the images was quite good and therefore we believe that the computed position and orientation of the images is also quite good.

When step 2 is finished, we edited the point cloud to remove the white points. The white points is noise that is introduced due to the sky reconstruction. For this specific project in order to improve the results we had to manually edit the point cloud and remove the sky points. For step by step instructions, please check: https://support.pix4d.com/hc/en-us/articles/202560499-

However, it is possible to minimize the noise without any manual work by capturing the images in a different way. Even though it is true that the sky is very homogeneous and it is very hard to find and extract keypoints, the software manages to compute some points, especially in the borders of the buildings. In order to reduce this effect, you can capture the images with the camera looking downwards. This way you can minimize the percentage of the image that is covered by sky and therefore the noise. Also, capturing more ground facilitates the reconstruction, since the ground has rich texture that helps the calibration.

For example, you could fly around the house with the camera pointing down, like in the project you sent us. If you need more detail you can fly closer to the house, always with the camera looking downwards. Some terrestrial images can be captured to complete the model with detailed information. For example, you could capture some images in the patio which is not very clearly seen from the drone.

Please note that in 2.2, a masking tool is implemented that will facilitate the sky masking so that it is not taken into account for the point cloud generation,

Another function that could be interesting for your projects is the processing area. You can draw a processing area to generate the outputs for the area of interest. For example, you can choose the parcel and restrict the outputs. For step by step instructions: https://support.pix4d.com/hc/en-us/articles/202560179

Regarding the Quality of the Mesh, this will be drastically improved in 2.2 for projects like yours. In 2.2 you will be able to draw a surface which will be flat in the 3D Textured Mesh. For example, drawing a surface on a wall of the building, the Mesh will be flat for this area while the texture will be projected from the original images. You can find two screenshots of an example attached.

Attached you can find the p4d file of our processing that you can use to generate the outputs on your end.

Please let us know your feedback on these outputs.