not sure how to describe this exactly but when i render out the orthomosaic i keep getting these kind of smear lines across areas where there isnt much ground texture ? mostly over gravel and some of the flat grassy sections. the building edges come out fine its just the open flat areas that look like the stitching just gave up or something.

im flying a mavic 3 enterprise, 75% front overlap 65 side, flying at around 80m. using DroneDeploy for the flight plan and processing. conditions were fine, not super windy, good light. i did the same mission last month and it was totally clean so im kind of confused whats different this time.

anybody run into this before or know what setting to look at

yeah that sounds like a texture matching issue, flat uniform surfaces like gravel are notoriously bad for photogrammetry because there arent enough distinct features for the algorithm to anchor on. what probably happened is the light was slightly different this time ? maybe more overcast? flat diffuse light makes it even worse on low texture surfaces. you can sometimes help it by bumping up your overlap on those specific areas if you can plan a second pass, or some people fly a crosshatch pattern over the problem zones.

also worth checking if your images are sharp ? even slight motion blur from the gimbal will cause exactly that smearing artifact you're describing. pull up a few of the raw images from that area and pixel peep them

tangentially related but i had simlar issues and it turned out my SD card was acting up and a few frames were slightly corrupted ? not obviously broken just subtly wrong exposure or something. DroneDeploy wouldnt flag them as bad images it would just try to use them anyway and the stitching in that zone would go weird. might be worth checking your image EXIF data for any outliers in the exposure or shutter speed values around the blurry sections