so ive been doing monthly progress shots for a mid-size commercial construction project, client wants orthomosaics and 3d models to show the PM team what's happening on site. been using DroneDeploy for about 8 months now mostly because the automated flight planning is dead simple and i can hand off the tablet to someone else if i need to and they wont screw it up too badly.

but honestly the point cloud outputs feel kind of... soft? like the detail on rebar and steel framing isnt great and when i tried to compare it to a pix4d output a colleague did for a similar job the pix4d one just looked sharper. could be the GCP setup though, im not super confident in my GCP workflow yet and im using a M3E so its not like im flying garbage hardware.

anyway curious what people are actually running for serious construction documentation stuff. is pix4d worth the subscription jump or am i just touching grass about the quality difference

the quality difference you're seeing is probably real but i'd bet half of it is GCP placement not the software. i switched from DD to pix4d about two years ago and yeah the outputs are better but only after i got my GCP game sorted. for construction i'm usually putting down 6-8 targets per hectare and doing RTK checkpoints on top of that. if your GCPs are off or you're relying purely on the M3E's RTK without physical targets you're going to get that mushy look regardless of what you process in.

that said pix4d does give you way more control over the processing parameters which matters a lot for scenes with lots of repetitive geometry like rebar or formwork. the default settings in DD are tuned for speed not for dense industrial detail. worth trying the pix4d trial on one of your existing datasets before you commit to paying for both.

i actually use both depending on the client lol. DD for anything where speed matters and the client just wants a nice looking map they can click around in, pix4d when the engineer needs actual deliverables with accuracy reports. the annotation and reporting tools in DD are honestly better for non-technical clients, easier to share links and stuff. but yeah for point cloud density pix4d wins pretty clearly in my experience