so ive been doing progress monitoring for a mid-size construction company for about 8 months now, flying a Mavic 3 Enterprise and generally happy with the results but im starting to hit the limits of what DroneDeploy can do, or at least what i understand how to do in it. the orthomosaics look fine, clients are happy, but when i try to get into the volumetric measurements for cut and fill stuff the numbers feel off sometimes and i cant tell if its a calibration issue, a GCP issue, or just DroneDeploy being weird about how it handles point clouds.

ive been looking at Pix4D and the processing does seem more configurable but honestly its a lot more to take in and the price jump is real. a guy i know swears by it for anything serious but he's doing a lot of corridor mapping and i think that might be a different use case than what im doing.

anyone here gone through the same decision? or is there a third option im not thinking about. i tried Reality Capture briefly but that felt like overkill and also required a beefier machine than i have right now.

been on pix4d for about 3 years doing mostly topographic work and the volumetric accuracy is noticeably better once you dial in your GCP workflow. the thing is though ? and this is important ? the software isnt going to save you if your ground control is sloppy. ive seen people blame pix4d for bad volume numbers and it turns out they were placing GCPs on soft ground that shifted between flights. if your DD numbers feel off id actually start there before switching anything.

that said if you're doing consistent site monitoring with a client who actually cares about the data pix4d mapper is worth the cost. the quality report alone tells you so much more about what went wrong in a processing run than DD ever did for me. just be ready to spend some time learning the processing options or you'll just get confused outputs and not know why.

random question but are you using RTK on the M3E or just the standard version? because that changes the conversation a lot for volumetrics. i was having similar issues and it turned out i was trusting the onboard GPS way too much for anything that needed sub-10cm accuracy. also what overlap are you running, i bumped mine up to like 80/75 and things got a lot tighter in the point cloud.