Evening folks!
Following on my the combination of my adventures in 3D drone mapping, then 3D printing etc…
I thought I’d highlight another great tool some of you might enjoy… Blender.
Blender is a free 3D modelling tool that can be used for drone mapping. Basically you can use something like Pix4D Capture to fly a mission and take lots of photos, then use Pix4D Cloud service or Open Drone Map (see link above) to compute all those photos into a map, point cloud, and 3D model. Then… you can use Blender to edit that 3D model and use its add-on www.blend4web.com to export the 3D into a single HTML web page which you can upload somewhere and then share with your clients.
Check out this one I made today, give it a chance to load its quite big! Use your mouse to move around and zoom etc.
http://www.digitalfauna.uk/blend/Moorcourt%20Farm.html
I made the above by basically doing the following steps:
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Fly a mission using Pix4D capture app connected to drone.
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Install Open Drone Map on laptop and upload and process the photos from mission.
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Take the output files from Open Drone Map once processed and load into blender (ODM outputs a .obj file which you can load into GIS, 3D printer software or blender in my case)
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Open Blender, install the blend4web add-on and then export the .obj file as a .html single web file.
Et voila! Your 3D drone map is online and ready to view!
I’ll have to work on getting file sizes down to something manageable!
Enjoy!