so ive been doing roofing estimates for about 12 years now and my business partner finally talked me into getting a drone for the inspection side of things. we picked up a mavic 3 enterprise a few months back and honestly the footage is incredible but im still not totally sure im getting everything i need out of it for actual insurance documentation and client reports.

like i can fly around and get great 4k video of missing shingles and flashing issues but when it comes to submitting this stuff to insurers or even just putting together a proper report for the client, i feel like im kind of winging it (no pun intended). are most of you using specific software to stitch this into something professional looking or are you just exporting clips and calling it a day. also do any of you fly close enough to actually identify granule loss or is that a situation where you still have to get someone up on the ladder anyway

we're in the midwest so we deal with a lot of hail damage claims and that seems to be where the drone is most useful but im not 100% sure how to systematically cover a roof so i dont miss sections. just been doing kind of a manual orbit pattern which feels sloppy

the orbit thing is fine for a quick visual but yeah for actual documentation you really want a proper grid pass, especially on larger commercial roofs. i typically do a nadir grid first at like 30 feet AGL which gives you good overlap for photogrammetry, then come back around with an oblique pass at maybe 45 degrees to catch the fascia and upper wall intersections. DroneDeploy is what most inspection guys around here use for automated mapping missions ? it'll handle the overlap and sidelap calculations and spit out an orthomosaic you can actually annotate and export as a PDF report. some insurers are starting to accept that format directly but honestly a lot of them still want a human on the roof for the final signoff on hail specifically because granule loss at that scale you genuinely cannot see it from the air unless you have thermal or a really good zoom lens and even then its iffy.

the enterprise has the 4/3 sensor right, so your resolution should be plenty for shingle-level detail if you're flying low enough. i'd say 20-25 feet for close inspection passes on residential. commercial you can push higher because the features are bigger.

we do a ton of cell tower and industrial chimney work and the roof stuff is almost identical workflow honestly. one thing that helped us a lot was standardizing the shot list before we even get on site ? like a checklist of angles and coverage areas we need to hit so nothing gets missed. sounds obvious but when youre flying and trying to think about everything at once its easy to forget the north face or whatever. also for granule loss specifically we've had decent luck with the zoom on the enterprise, doing like a slow hover pass really close to the surface but yeah someone still ends up on the roof half the time for hail claims, the drone is more for the initial triage and for showing the client what's going on before they even go up there. saves a lot of back and forth.