Thursday, May 28, 2020

Creating Animations to Visualize Changes in Assets

Overview                                                                                                                                        Approximately my 2nd Commercial UAS flight working at USI Consultants, I was tasked with flying a photogrammetry mission to compare changes in earthwork for a project located in Hamilton County Indiana.  Since employees were nice to me being the “new guy”, I used a previous successful mission as a template and tweaked some of the settings to fine tune the specific parameters of the mission I was tasked with flying. 

Unique Mission Variables                                                                                                  During this time, Covid-19 was at its peak, and it was significantly more contagious because there were no vaccinations to prevent the spread. Nevertheless, we wanted to show the client the changes from our touchless assessments as well as deliver them a quantity for the earthwork they moved. 

Opportunity to Showcase Video Animations                              Video animations have their place for marketing purposes but are typically not worth the time making for engineering projects. However, in this case, we had four elements that made this project unique. 

  1.  A previous flight with that captured the same subject
  2. The ability to use animation trajectories from photogrammetry software
  3. The need to visualize a change 
  4. The need to provide a quantity 

As a result, I created a side by side video animation that could be shared with everyone needed to see the site changes which ultimately saved time, lowered cost, and in this case eliminated the need for unnecessary exposure to Covid….One might argue that Covid exposure is low when being outside since this was an outdoor project, but imagine if a crew had to stop to get gas on the way to the site or needed to take 5 additional vehicles….could the exposure risk be exposed? Would the travel cost be reasonable still? Below is the link to the animation with the mentioned elements. 

Video: Stockpile Animation Generated from UAS Data

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