so ive been doing roofing estimates for about 12 years and just started incorporating a mavic 3 into the workflow about 6 months ago. honestly i was skeptical at first because i figured id still need to get up there anyway to confirm stuff but the time savings are pretty real especially on flat membrane roofs where you can spot ponding areas and obvious membrane failures from the air pretty clearly.

thing is im running into clients who want actual documentation for insurance purposes and im not sure if what im capturing is detailed enough. im shooting in regular photo mode at maybe 20-30 feet AGL and it looks fine on screen but when you zoom in on the deliverables the resolution starts to fall apart a little. wondering if anyone doing this professionally has figured out the right altitude and overlap settings to get usable deliverables that actually hold up when someone scrutinizes them. or if theres a better sensor option im missing.

yeah the mavic 3 is decent but if youre doing this for actual insurance documentation you really want to be shooting with enough overlap to run it through photogrammetry software and generate an orthomosaic. something like 75-80% front and side overlap at around 50-60ft AGL on a flat roof gives you way better coverage than just manually flying around snapping photos. pix4d or even the free version of webodm will stitch it into something you can actually annotate and hand off as a deliverable that looks professional.

the raw jpegs alone are kind of a hard sell to adjusters in my experience, they want something with measurements they can reference. once you start delivering orthos with scale bars people stop questioning the methodology pretty quick.

im just getting into the inspection side of things so take this with a grain of salt but i did a residential roof last month for a friend and even just the normal photo mode on my air 2s caught a cracked ridge cap that wasnt visible from the ground at all. i think for basic damage assessment it works fine but yeah for anything formal i imagine you need more than just handheld shots. curious what software people are actually using for the documentation side because that part confuses me more than the flying honestly.