My firm has been using Pix4Dmapper for several months and have had pretty good success with it. Right now the majority of our time on a project is spent cleaning up the classification of the points because lots of the buildings end up being classified as ground, or vehicles get classified as ground or road, etc. We typically go area by area and manually select the points and reclassify them but this is a pretty cumbersome.
One of the biggest helps would be be able to select the points by color so that for example, we can select all the bushes which are typically green (we do a lot of work in the desert so they stand out from the dirt) and then classify them as vegetation. In doing a search online, it looks like Pix4Dsurvey has that ability, and we haven’t used that program at all so we are looking into trying that.
My question is can you import and export the point clouds and their classifications between the two programs? For example, could we create the point cloud in mapper and do the point classification in that, import that point cloud into survey to be able to select by color, and then take it back into mapper? If that isn’t possible, can this be added as a feature?
Hi Landon!
Thanks for asking. I’m the product owner for PIX4Dsurvey, so I can try to help you on that side of the equation.
Yes, you can select by color in Pix4Dsurvey and use that to refine the classes that you created in Mapper. From there, I’m guessing that you want to make a surface? In that case, Survey has a terrain workflow that will let you create a grid of points (or smart points) from the terrain class, and then use them to make a TIN that can be exported to LandXML for your CAD. The TIN is a direct replacement for your DTM, and also respects vectorized breaklines.
I’d encourage you to download Survey and see how it goes - you get a two week free trial that’s fully functional, and I’m happy to answer any questions that come up.
thanks,
Nate
Thank you Nate for the response. You are correct in that our ultimate goal is to create a surface. Right now, we use Mapper to stich together our photos and create the point cloud and then after a lot of manual point reclassification we make a DTM that we can then use in CAD.
Based on your response, it sounds like there isn’t a way to take the point classification that that Pix4DSurvey does and send it back to Mapper. Just want to confirm that before asking my next question.
If I understand correctly the workflow you are describing in Pix4DSurvey would be exactly what we need. I wasn’t aware that Pix4DSurvey could created a TIN. So we could use Pix4Dmapper to create the point cloud from our aerial photos and orthomosaic photo, and then import the point cloud into Pix4DSurvey to do the point classification and generate a tin? If you take the point cloud from Pix4DMapper does Pix4DSurvey recognize the point classifications Pix4Dmapper created (at least as a starting point for your filtering and cleanup in Pix4DSurvey)?
I know this is a lot of questions, so I really appreciate all the feedback. My firm activated a trial of Pix4DSurvey the same time we tried Pix4DMapper, but never really touched the Pix4DSurvey. I will have to see about getting a trial so that we can see if Pix4DSurvey is right for us.
Hi @landon.rowan ,
Yes, you’ve got it right. PIX4Dsurvey will import the mapper point cloud, including classes, and you can make a surface from there (including refining classes, creating breaklines (we call them terrain layers) and even contours). https://support.pix4d.com/hc/en-us/articles/360031902532-PIX4Dsurvey-FAQ#label2a has some info as well.
If you need another trial of Survey, just PM me the right email address to use and I can do that.