Wallplate Measurement

January 29, 2026 11:07
4 comments

Hi; We have a roofing company that manufactures timber roof trusses for residential and commercial buildings and we need a way to fly the drone over a building which walls are built up to wall plate level and get a top down 90deg image of the walls which we can then scale to size and use to measure the walls etc.

Images.When i import into Pix4Dreact it distorts the image.

Pix4Dreact image.

What the walls look like drawn in cad

Comments

4 comments

Barry Houldsworth Dronelink Expert
- January 29, 2026 12:16
This is a processing issue, not an issue with Dronelink. You will need to discuss with Pix4D how to correct.

I've had similar issues with other software on sites with a lot of parallel lines - it really confuses the software.

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Dale Tiley
- January 29, 2026 12:54
Thanks, I did think there were maybe too many lines for the system to work with. This was flown manually though. set the drone to 1.2m/s and a fixed altitude then flew a couple of passes over the building taking photo's every 5s which is the minimum for the Mini 5 Pro.

The two main issues I'm having is that flying manually doesn't really work very well as the pics are all over the place they don't align nicely in a grid.

Another issue is that these buildings are all new builds i.e.. requiring roofs so generally you cannot navigate to the map and preplan the flight based on the address as its generally blank. Old image on the map. I need a way to create a default grid pattern and when I'm on site load that grid place it over the building and start the flight. any idea how that workflow can be achieved?

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Dale Tiley
- January 29, 2026 12:57
This is the view you get on the maps. The building I want to measure is somewhere in the polygon I have created in the top left.

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Barry Houldsworth Dronelink Expert
- January 29, 2026 14:33
A few things to suggest.
1. If you are only doing an orthomosaic (straight down) there is usually no need to run a grid - just to a lawnmower pattern is plenty.
2. If your software is getting confused then fewer photos can be better (see 1)
3. You should be able to go faster than 5 seconds for capture - 2 seconds should be fine. I suspect you have JPEG and RAW set, so just change it to JPEG. You don't need RAW for orthomosaics.
4. It is possible to fly it automatically using the technique shown here - https://youtu.be/Uuk21sVoZRo. It's a bit of a hack but it does work and will make things much more consistent.
5. Some software (I haven't used Pix4D for a while so not sure about that) has the option for you to force it to consider the GPS location during processing, which can help ensure that photos don't end up in the wrong spot. See if it has that and if it makes a difference.
Good luck!
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