so ive been doing monthly progress shots for a mid-size commercial construction project and i started out with dronedeploy because it was just easier to get up and running, the automated flight planning and the live map feature is genuinely useful when youre on site and the client wants to see something immediately.

but ive started running into issues with the orthomosaic accuracy on areas with a lot of vertical relief ? like around the concrete forms and steel framing ? and someone at a job site told me pix4d handles that better because of how it processes the point cloud. i honestly dont know enough about the backend to say if thats true or if he was just a pix4d fanboy.

my current setup is a mavic 3 enterprise with the RTK module so the GCP situation is mostly sorted, im getting sub-5cm horizontal on flat areas no problem. the issue is more about the 3d mesh quality and whether the client can actually use it in their BIM workflow. anyone switched between the two for this kind of use case?

been using pix4dmatic for large construction sites for about a year and a half and honestly the point cloud density is noticeably better for complex geometry, especially anything with overhangs or stacked materials. dronedeploy is fine if the deliverable is just an ortho and a basic volume report but if theyre trying to pull that into revit or navisworks the mesh out of pix4d just holds up better under scrutiny.

that said the processing time on pix4dmatic with a full site dataset can be brutal if youre not throwing serious hardware at it. i ended up moving to cloud processing which adds cost but at least i get results the same day. dronedeploy cloud is faster in my experience but again the output quality just isnt the same for vertical structures. for flat earthworks and stockpile volumes dronedeploy is totally fine though, i still use it for those.

what overlap percentages are you flying at? i had similar mesh weirdness around vertical stuff and bumping frontal overlap to like 85% and side to 75% made a big difference, more so than switching software tbh. might be worth trying before paying for a whole new subscription