so anyway i finally got a chance to do a proper mapping mission over this gravel pit site last week and the results are kind of a mess. im using dronedeploy with my m300 and the orthomosaic has these wavy distortion artifacts kind of like the ground is rippling, especially on the flat open sections. the 3d model looks like someone melted it slightly.

conditions were probably not ideal, wind was gusting maybe 18-22mph and the drone was visibly crabbing on some of the flight lines. i had my overlap set to 80 front 70 side which i thought was plenty. GSD was around 2.8cm flying at about 100m. processed in dronedeploy cloud overnight and thats what i got.

is this a wind problem messing up the image geometry or is something off with my camera settings? shutter speed was on auto which i've heard can cause issues but i didnt think it would be this bad. kind of embarrassing because the client was expecting a volume calc for their stockpiles and the numbers are definitely off

yeah almost certainly the wind combined with auto shutter. when the drone is getting pushed around between frames you're getting inconsistent camera angles that the photogrammetry engine struggles to reconcile, and if your shutter was dragging at all during the crabbing you'd get motion blur in the images which just destroys the feature matching. dronedeploy's processing cant really compensate for that, neither can pix4d honestly.

for stockpile volumes specifically you really want calm conditions or at least consistent wind direction so the drone can maintain a predictable attitude. i'd reshoot it if you can, set a manual shutter of at least 1/1000 if the lighting allows and check your image log to see what the actual overlap looked like in flight vs what you planned, sometimes it drops way off when theres gust variation

the wavy artifact thing on flat surfaces is almost always a dishing or bowl effect from not having GCPs. were you flying with GCPs? because even with good overlap if youre relying purely on drone GPS for georeferencing the elevation model will curve at the edges and look weird on anything flat. gravel pits are the worst for this because theres not a lot of texture variation for the software to grab onto.

wind probably didnt help but ive seen that same melted look on totally calm days when someone skips ground control. volume numbers will be way off without it too, like embarrassingly off depending on the size of the stockpiles