been doing residential roofing inspections for about 8 months now and i feel like my workflow is all over the place. started with a Mavic 3 and its fine but im noticing on steeper pitches or complex hip roofs i keep missing valleys because i'm just doing a basic orbit and calling it done. insurance adjusters keep asking for more coverage of the ridgeline and flashing areas and honestly i don't always nail it first pass.

curious what routes other people are flying for roofs. do you preplan it in Dronelink or Litchi or are you mostly manual? also how close are you getting - i've been hovering around 15-20ft AOM which feels right but sometimes the detail on granule loss just isnt there even at 20mp. thinking about whether a zoom lens setup makes more sense than just getting closer physically with the drone.

not trying to overthink it but want to tighten this up before i start going after commercial flat roof work which feels like a whole different thing

flat roofs are honestly way easier to systematize than residential pitched stuff, so that transition should feel pretty natural once you sort out the residential side. for pitched roofs i do a combo - automated perimeter pass first just to get the overall condition and context shots for the report, then i go fully manual for the detail work on valleys, flashing, penetrations, that kind of thing. you really cant automate your way through a complex hip roof and get usable stuff for an adjuster, in my experience they always want to see the step flashing up close and no orbit mission is gonna get that angle right.

on the zoom vs proximity question - i picked up the Mavic 3 Enterprise with the tele lens and it changed things a lot for me. staying 30ft out and using the 7x tele for granule detail is actually way safer than creeping to 10ft over a steep 8:12 pitch and risking a clip. the enterprise package isnt cheap but if you're billing inspection work regularly it pays back fast.

yeah the valley thing is a real issue, i kept getting flagged on those too. what finally helped me was doing a dedicated low slow pass specifically for each valley - like treat every valley as its own mini subject instead of trying to catch it on a wider pass. takes longer but the shots are actually usable. im still on a basic Mavic Air 2 so im definitely getting closer than i probably should on some of these but it works for now