Volume Report

It would be nice to be able to generate a Volume report directly from Pix4D.
Something like:
An image of the area of interest
Contour map
Calculation Results

25 Likes

Hello Steven,

Thank you for your suggestions, we will communicate them to the product development team,

Regards

2 Likes

Yes please, as we are in high need of the same request.  We measure over 150+ stock piles per month for a large quarry.  manually creating reports is very labour intensive.  Pix4D has all the required data, just need to export to a few data friendly formats (ie: pdf, html, excel, kml)

Would be nice to include vol label name on stock piles in the overall map/image.

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I am also in need of a report like this.  Is there any update since July 2015? 

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Still relevant; I’d be very interested in that output as well!

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Specially with https://www.stockpilereports.com/ pushing into the market fast.

Any updates on this request? Is it in your product pipeline?

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+1 on this.  Output to pdf would be great.  I currently have to take screen shots and put them into Word, then make a PDF out of that as backup of the volumes I calculated.

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This request went in on July 2015.  I know there has been a lot of great improvements in the product, but reporting is an obvious weakness. Right now I am evaluating DroneDeploy.com and StockpileReports.com for the simple fact that these will provide me a report that shows all my stockpile on a map (with contours only for the piles) and all the volume details (and density conversion) on a nice clean report.  It take me hours and hours to get something similar in Pix4D.  I really love how powerful the product is, but if reporting i something that is clearly an afterthought.  I bet there will be a lot of people tempted to switch over to other platforms just because it has taken over a year and a half and there is STILL no simple stockpile report.  I am sure it would be very quick to create since most of the data is already there.  IT would be really nice to have a simple list of product names/tyeps with density information so that we don’t have to keep manually typing in names for all of the piles which again is a quick fix, but something that would really benefit people who are doing stockpile volumes.  

Can someone from Pix4D comment and let us know if a stockpile report is coming soon??

Thanks! 

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We are also very interested in this as well. We are looking at 2 white label hosting platforms for stock pile reports.  Hoping Pix4D has in their 2017 pipeline.

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Hello all

Marc, just wanted to know if there has been any development with this topic? We are seeing a lot of traction on the ground for this type of product and would like to know that Pix4D is considering it?

1 Like

Hello all,

Thank you for your feedback and suggestions. 
Unfortunately, there is no Volume reporting in our last version that we just released: Download Pix4D latest version

I am passing all your ideas to our Product Development Team.

If any updates on this topic, we ll comment on this post!

Christina

Please thumbs up the post to give it more weight if you would like to see this feature :) 

5 Likes

This is something that is critical to the product and our jobs.  As others have mentioned the product is great but it takes way too long to generate reports since it all has to be done manually.  In every other platform out there this is a standard feature.  

As much as we like Pix4D it has been over 2 years since this request was mentioned and it is still not available.  Not even a simple basic version.  Due to this we are now evaluating other products.  If you have hot heard of Propeller I highly recommend you have a look at it.  They are heavily focused on quarry management and are constantly adding in features that we need for Stockpile volumetrics.

 

6 Likes

I was hoping for a pretty simple report.  It would more or less reformat the volume section of pix4d with an image of the volume next to the calculation.

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Yeah… I was hoping for something a bit more than that but even a simple report to start with would be a step in the right direction.  After 2 year I would have though something basic would have been there at least to start but it does not appear to be a priority.

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As Tim, and Tom has stated.  This is critical to our workflows, being able to be competitive in our market place.  With Virtual Surveyor and Propeller having very good feature sets. Example: Virtual Surveyor automated stock pile base line/toe section can reduce our in office time by 40% and Propeller having white label options and rich online reporting feature sets. I truly hope Pix4D realizes they will lose customers.  We do over 500+ stock pile measurements per month (this number will grow in 2018) and it is painful not knowing if this feature set is in Pix4D pipeline. 

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While we’re on the subject, it would be nice if we could set the output to cubic yards instead of cubic feet if we are using Imperial measurements.

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Dear all,

We really appreciate your feedback. I reassure you that your opinion is important for us and all your comments are passed to our development team.

We constantly do our best to improve our software to best cover our clients’ needs. Here you can see some of our next development tools: Classification of aerial photogrammetric 3D point clouds

We have put lots of effort in developing an advanced point cloud classification tool.

I understand  this is not related to your requests, I just wanted to highlight that we are constantly working on new tools and algorithms.

It is not possible to say when a volume reporting tool will be available. However, rest assured that your request will be taken into account by our development team.

Christina

Hello Christina,

While your advanced point cloud classification tool is interesting, to me this is more of a “nice to have” as opposed to something I NEED to do my job.  Perhaps many of your other subscribers would prefer to have that over some stockpile/volumetric reports (dare I ask for some basic Stockpile/Quarry Management features too???) but I am for sure not one of them.  

The whole point of using a drone and Pix4D was so that we could survey our quarries quicker, safer, more accurately and generate reports that will hold up on audit.  The first 2 items are for sure met.  There is no doubt using a drone is way faster than how we used to do it, and for sure safer since there are no climbing piles.  Accuracy also seems to be well within acceptable limits.  We have done some internal tests of known volumes and this has proven that we can get very accurate results when using Pix4D and our drone.

Where everything falls apart is on generating reports that will hold up on an external audit.  Pix4D simply does not generate anything that I would consider a finished report when it comes to volumetrics/stockpile volumes.  This means we need to use exports, copy and paste data, and create them manually.  Not only is this VERY labour intensive and time consuming, our external auditors tear it apart since there is no end to end workflow.  As soon as we introduce all of the exporting and copy and pasting we now introduce the possibility of human error or mistakes in reporting.  This is now requiring us to use a 3rd party provider to survey our quarterly stockpile volumes since those are the ones our external auditors inspect at year end.  We still do our own flights with Pix4D on a monthly bases and our results are within 3% of what the 3rd party provider does, so we know what we are doing is good, we just can’t prove without a doubt that the workflow from end to end was not altered or tampered with, so we are required to spend $2,000 per quarry 4 times a year to have another company fly our quarries for the sole reason that we don’t have proper reporting built into the product we are using (Pix4D).

So you may have great new point cloud tools/development going on, but when you have a HUGE hole in your product (like basic volumetric reporting) that was identified and passed on to the developers 2+ years ago ant it still has not been improved, and isn’t even on the development roadmap, it really does not instil me with a lot of confidence that this will ever get addressed.

I am not alone on this either.  I know of at least 5 other users who have all left Pix4D for other packages because the reporting is non-existent and as far as surveying for quarries goes, there are MANY other packages out there where this is their primary focus with much more advanced tools.  With Pix4D surveying quarries is something it can do, but it is clearly not a priority for Pix4D to be seen as a leader in this area.

Anyways, I think I have said enough (maybe more than enough?) about this.  It is unfortunate but it is time for my company to find a replacement for Pix4D.

 

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Hello Christina, 

I with Tim would also like to ensure we communicate with Pix4D and be transparent.  Our firm just received a global contract from one of the world largest cement/quarry companies.  We provide internal and external UAS based audit stock pile surveys on a rapidly growing scale. We have been tasked with assisting our client with a UAS/Survey solution/work flow integration with their corporate SAP framework.  

Our firm is very embedded with UAS mapping/surveying for both the public and private sectors and have a front line perspective on the market trends and demands.  Quarry/Mining/Landfill earthworks vertical markets clearly have the best RIO with UAS tech, I just find it extremely odd Pix4D would not focus on this market opportunity. 

3 Likes