so ive been doing monthly progress shots for a mid-size commercial construction project and the PM wants proper orthomosaic deliverables and volume calculations for the earthworks phase. been using DroneDeploy because its just easier to set up missions on the fly from my phone but honestly the volume accuracy has been bothering me a bit compared to what the surveyors are getting with their total station.

a buddy of mine swears by Pix4D for anything where actual numbers matter but god that software is heavy and the learning curve if you want to do anything beyond the defaults is pretty steep. also the licensing cost is not nothing especially if youre not doing this full time.

curious what people are actually running day to day for this kind of work. is the pix4d accuracy worth the hassle or am i just not tuning DroneDeploy outputs correctly

been running Pix4D for about three years now on civil projects and yeah the accuracy is genuinely better if you set your GCPs properly and actually go through the quality report instead of just accepting the default outputs. the thing most people miss is the image overlap settings ? if youre doing volume calcs you really want 80/80 or even higher depending on site conditions, flat featureless dirt is brutal for tie points.

that said DroneDeploy has gotten a lot better and for progress photos and basic reporting its honestly fine. where it falls apart for me is anything that needs to go into a CAD workflow downstream. the pix4d output plays nicer with Civil3D in my experience. but if your surveyors are just eyeballing the volumes against your drone outputs the difference might not even matter practically speaking.

we switched to Metashape actually, way cheaper than both and the output quality is comparable to pix4d at least for what we do. worth looking at if cost is a factor