so ive been doing bi-weekly progress documentation for a mid-size commercial build and the PM is starting to ask for more than just photos, they want actual measurements and volume calcs for the earthwork stage. currently just running DroneDeploy on a Mavic 3 Enterprise and it handles the ortho mosaics fine but honestly the volumetric stuff feels a bit rough around the edges to me, like the numbers dont always line up with what the site engineer is getting from ground truth.

been looking at Pix4D and the processing is obviously way more involved but i wonder if the accuracy bump is actually worth the workflow headache and the price jump. anyone gone through this and actually compared the two on a real site? not talking about the youtube reviews, talking about like actual construction use.

ran both on a highway project last year, not construction exactly but similar deal with earthwork volumes. Pix4Dmapper gives you a lot more control over the point cloud processing and the GCP workflow is just cleaner once you know what youre doing. DD is faster to get something usable but yeah the volumes were consistently off by a few percent compared to our survey crew's numbers. for anything where the client is actually making decisions based on volume that margin matters.

that said if you're not placing GCPs the accuracy ceiling is about the same regardless of software, the bottleneck becomes your flight altitude and overlap. what overlap are you running currently and are you doing any ground control?

i switched to Pix4D like 8 months ago after having similar frustrations with DD volumes and honestly the learning curve is real, took me a while to stop getting garbage point clouds because i was messing up the processing options. but once it clicks its pretty solid. also the desktop processing means youre not waiting on cloud queue times which used to drive me insane with DD during busy periods