Ruhani Rabin
5 min readFeb 26, 2020
10 Best Photogrammetry Software for 3d Mapping Using Drones Featured Image

When you’re choosing software for 3D mapping, so many incredible options can integrate with drones as well. In this article, we look at 10 ultimate software packages that you should consider purchasing.

There is such a variety of 3D drawing software. So many companies are offering different kinds of programs, so what do you choose? Fortunately, we’ve done all the hard work for you. Take a look at our guide of the best photogrammetry software programs. Ready? Let’s find out more!

1. 3D Mapping — DroneDeploy

This is a fantastic mobile integration, allowing you to fly drones, create interactive maps and models. It is straightforward to operate for both a beginner and a professional. The best thing about it is that it syncs with almost all of the drawings available on the market, including the Mavic Pro, Phantom 3, and Matrice models. With a couple of taps, you will be able to fly your drone in a purely autonomous way and process all of your imagery to come up with models and maps of high 3D definition. This photogrammetry can be analyzed, annotated, and shared with others.

Drone photography is a great way to capture and showcase commercial buildings or real estate. For example, a UK casino took aerial photographs capturing the beauty of a building and lights from various heights, angles, distances, and directions.

Features:

  • Custom parameters, including sides and front altitude, image overlap, and camera settings.
  • Ability to rotate flight direction.
  • Offline flight features.
  • Live streaming.
  • Easy flight coordination.
  • You can disable auto flight controls and resume control with the touch of a button.

2. Pix 4D Mapping Software

This is truly first-class map-making software that allows you to create very competent models from a series of images. It is effortless to turn any photo into a precise 3D model or geo-referenced map. The latter can be entirely customized and used by all sorts of software and applications. This program can create orthomosaic maps, terrain models, point clouds, and so much more.

Features:

  • It is very easy to obtain elevation values for each pixel.
  • Maps are of top resolution.
  • It’s effortless to make accurate contour and volume calculations.

3. DroneDeploy’s Enterprise 3D Mapping Software

This wonderful platform provides brilliant aerial information, allowing you to facilitate large-scale drone operations. With this software, it’s possible to manage a whole team of drones, each of which can create stunning photogrammetry maps. You can process your data and store it onto a cloud. This makes it easy for you to collaborate with other people and share the information.

Features:

  • You can download data in many different formats.
  • Managing and planning automatic lights.
  • Easy to share maps and connect with other tools available in the application market.
  • Integrates with various APIs.

4. ReCap Pro

This is a 3D modeling software that allows you to create maps from photographs or laser scans. The final product can be exported so that it is ready for both CAD or BIM authoring tools to use. ReCap Pro utilizes state-of-the-art technology, allowing you to process thousands of photos that you have on the cloud. You can sync ReCap with various apps to tweak your designs further.

5. Maps Made Easy

With this software, you can easily process every aerial image into a 3D model or an Orthophoto map. The company also lets you host maps instead of having to save things onto your drive. After flying over a particular area and capturing images, you can upload them into this app, which will stitch them together into a single 3D map using the power of servers. We would thoroughly recommend this product if you have limited space on your computer. There are also no limits on the resolution that you want to upload so that you can go really detailed with your maps.

photogrammetry  Maps Made Easy

6. Open Drone Map

This fantastic photogrammetry software allows you to tweak aerial drone imagery in a whole range of ways. It takes various images and collates them, putting them into a 3D piece of data. You can then combine this information with all sorts of other geographical datasets. It’s a fabulous app if you want to process UAS images into many different products, including digital elevation models, point clouds, orthorectified imagery, textured digital service models, and classified point clouds.

Open Drone Map photogrammetry

7. 3DF’s Zephyr

This company has developed some highly competent photogrammetry software that can create stunning 3D models from all sorts of photographs. We highly suggest this as being one of the most competent apps for capturing reality, plus it is full of intuitive and exciting features for you to use. The software also has a user-friendly interface, making it very easy to export 3D models quickly. It also includes options to create high definition videos, so you don’t have to purchase any external software to integrate if you want to do this.

8. Sim Active Correlator SD

This company is a reputable brand and a leading player in the industry of photogrammetry software. This particular app was patented to allow cutting-edge solutions for the generation of geospatial and high-quality data from aerial imagery and satellites.

Features:

  • Advanced 3D modeling.
  • Orthomosaics.
  • Very good at mapping digital terrain.
  • Vectorized 3D features.
  • DSM models can be created easily.

9. Agisoft PhotScan Software

This drone software really pulls out all the stops. Agisoft has designed the program to allow you easily generate all sorts of digital images of 3D geographical data. When we used it, it was effortless to create dynamic scenes and 4D models. It is a highly user-friendly piece of software that includes all sorts of features to tweak and modify your models.

10. Arc GIS’s ESRI Drone2Map

With this technology, you can create 3D maps, meshes very quickly. Everybody knows Arc GIS as pioneers in mapmaking, modeling, and Geographic Information Systems, so it’s terrific that this piece of software can integrate so easily with other Arc GIS products. It’s a great digital kit for providing ground control and drone support. There are also all sorts of features that can automate image processing. You can have a brilliant 3D model in a matter of clicks.

Conclusion

We really believe that you can take something from our article. Hopefully, we’ve demonstrated a variety of great drone mapping software that can be purchased today. Every single piece of map software and image editing software that we’ve highlighted comes with all sorts of great features that can make modeling easy. You should also check them out because many companies offer free trial periods so that you can test out the app for yourself before making a purchase.

Have you ever used flight planning software? Do you love flying drones? Share all of your stories, thoughts, and reflections in our comment section below.

Originally posted at RuhaniRabin.com
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Ruhani Rabin

Ruhani Rabin being a tech and product evangelist for two decades. He was VP, GM, CPO for various digital companies. Obsessed with Generative AI now.