Just a little test from my Android cellphone

The shadow signature of your hex is outstanding too.

Nice work Gary, love that you are into the Multicopter and sharing your stills/synth. Puts me in the mood to continue working on my 8. Nice pics! cheers

Fantastic point cloud

Nice! Pity about the house, though.

Thanks Nathanael

I see that Overhead View is working for you in this synth. Nicely done!

I just checked my comments. Sorry about the grammatical errors.

Hey Gary, It seem that the curvature is not apparent in this synth. I checked the overhead view and it is upside down. I am very much a "newbie" when it come to aerial photography, so I do not know all the ins and outs of what you deal with. When I looked at the point capture in meshlab, I was able to turn the image rightside up. Is this "turning" in meshlab still usable data or is everything reversed as well? I am really not sure how or if you guys are able to manipulate the data, if it needs to be. I have one more question... what is nadir? I have read the word within several synths, and I could not find a proper definition for it. At least not in relation to aerial photography. Regards, Jim

Amazing point cloud. Well done

great job, Gary!

No I have not a level Jim, but I will get one next time I am in town. Perhaps the easier way of doing that would be to suspend the camera and let gravity level it. Firing Canons with CHDK maybe? I did do the synths for my own comparison, I must admit I am still a little lost as to what makes great synths and what does not! But seeing the point clouds more than makes up for that, I'm amazed every time ;-)

Oh, and it is a beautiful synth as well.

Hey Gary, Jim here. Please tell me you used the levels. I hope you don't mind but I checked the level of your photos and most of them were pretty darn close. Some were a bit off and others I could not determine. If you did not use the level, then you have really good sea legs. If you did take the time, and these are indeed 2 side by sides, thank you. I have been doing this type of experimenting for over 3 months. Taking that many pictures is fun for the first 10 minutes. Did you let a trained chimp take the "A lot of church"? Either way, you did prove that camera orientation does make a huge difference. "Take as many photos from as many different angles" is the usual way, and you certainly did that.And the ratio of photos taken between each synt. Almost half the number and more than twice the result. Nice job. If this was a side by side comparison, then thank you for taking the time out of your day for this. It is appreciated. Jim

Stunning work G!! Now to find someone who can help us turn this into a real 3D model. Cheers, Mike

Roughly 2 by 2 km Tony, I'm just going to dive out the door and do some more. Trying to get it all to link up. I think I have worked out a way of doing it in one flight but once I have joined this one up I will try that. So far I think this is the result of about 5 sorties. I now have the camera taking more than 75% of usable images so I'm happy with that.

How much area would you say this covers?

Very nice to have pictures from a plane featured in a photosynth. This puts a new perspective on applications of photosynth!

This one is a work in progress more to come soon with it

Ah I think I see!!! I have just added some pictures with horizon in them to my quarry attempt and I also tryed to get some as I descended and then get those to link with some stood on the ground of the views. Hoping that synth will then work things out from that. I am rather afraid that I have become an instant addict, I'm not really reading all the instructions and just getting on with it!! So lets see its 700 odd images so will take a while! A secondary effect of this playing is I am ending up with some pretty cool single vertical shots of interesting textures and shadows. I can't get bored looking at the earth from the sky.

When I mention the camera being at "45 degrees" above, I mean 45 degrees of either pitch or of roll up away from straight down. It needn't be 45, but I think it's a fair example. Basically, Photosynth assumes that the photos will be uploaded "right side up" + for the majority of people that will mean walking along the surface of the earth where up is sky + down is Earth. You can stretch this somewhat with aerials, as long as you have enough shots North, South, East, West for all of the 'not quite level' shots to balance each other out, but having them all look straight down requires you to manually tell the synther what is going on + for the time being there is no such way that I'm aware of. Something very related to your synths are KAP synths + hot air balloon synths, whose cameras are at the mercy of the wind when taking shots. Look up tbenedict here on the site to see the variation of angles that his synths incorporate without fooling overhead view.

Per your question, yes, this also holds true for geo-alignment in the site's synth editor, as it uses the vector calculated for overhead view to display the pointcloud at. It attempts to display the surface of the earth in the synth flat against your screen so that it will match the angle of the satellite imagery, but fails to correctly do so, for reasons sketched out above, in cases where all the shots look straight down.

I may be oversimplifying things, but think of Photosynth taking into consideration the way that photos are actually uploaded as a clue of which way is 'up'. It seems to me that it takes an average of the majority of the photos' 'up's to calculate the overall synth's 'up'. When the camera is angled at closer to 45 degrees, all the photos' 'up' will have the horizon (or close to it) in common. By contrast, when all the photos look straight down, the average 'up' will only turn out to be whichever direction you were flying when the majority of your shots were taken: i.e. North-NorthWest. That means that since the average 'up' follows the surface of the Earth, when Photosynth tries to look 'straight down' it actually ends up looking along the crust of the earth, rather than straight down at 90 degrees as it should.

Thanks Tony, would that then mean it would flatten it as it were, better for putting down on the Bing map?? I can't fathom that bit.

Thanks for your kind words. I will try that tommorrow. I was talking to my mate Mike today about trying that, and then doing a big circle. We might even be able to do one orbit with the camera almost flat then tilt it a bit then another orbit, then tilt again and so on and so on, from a simple circle you could cover a heck of an area.

These aerial synths of your are stellar stuff! Photosynth is a tad mixed up at the moment as to which way is down (not your fault), but if the Photosynth team can give you a hand, this ought to be able to be geo-aligned very nicely, once the pointcloud lays flat on the map. I have no idea how much longer it will be before we are able to see our synths with official Bing Maps imagery behind them, but when it happens, these photos of yours will be exceptional. There's absolutely nothing wrong with the way you're doing things now, + I realise that your options may be limited but I'd be interested in seeing the results of your camera looking out the side of the aircraft so that it looked at the ground at roughly 45 degrees, especially when circling a subject. I'm not sure how feasible that is aerodynamically or balance-wise, nor how difficult it is to not get the wing in the shot when the camera is pointed towards the banking wing, but if it's possible, give it a go.