Mapping flight · May 20, 2026
Swiss Mittelland · 0.7 ha test site
An anonymised Swiss test site with 60 m of elevation change — typical of the hilly properties that planners, municipalities and developers commission every month. Everything below — the interactive map, the 3D model, the delivery artefacts, the numbers — comes directly from the real flight, not a stock demo. This is what a typical delivery from us looks like.
100 / 100 photos · 46.2 M points · cm-genau
Orthophoto
An orthomosaic is a scale-accurate aerial image — every pixel carries a real GPS coordinate. You can measure directly in it (lengths, areas, distances), import it as a layer in GIS software, or use it for government permit submissions. What you see here is the real result of this flight, served from a tiled GeoTIFF pyramid — drag and zoom to navigate.
Surface Model (DSM)
The Digital Surface Model captures the top envelope of the site — ground plus everything standing on it: vegetation, buildings, power lines. Colour tones encode elevation directly (warmer = higher, cooler = lower). Used for volume calculations, shadow analysis and high-point identification.
Terrain Model (DTM)
The Digital Terrain Model shows only the bare ground — vegetation, buildings and other structures are filtered out. From it you compute real landforms, drainage, excavation volumes and realistic elevation profiles for construction planning. Generated from the classified ground points of the point cloud.
Plant Health (NDVI)
When flown with a multispectral sensor, the Plant Health analysis delivers an NDVI layer (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index) — a map that reads vegetation vitality from the ratio between red and near-infrared reflectance. Standard for agriculture, forestry and vegetation monitoring.
Textured 3D model
The 3D model shows every surface of the site with real photo texture — ground, vegetation, structures. It works for visualisations in marketing and sales materials, for volume and mass calculations on construction sites, and as a shared discussion surface in planning meetings. Compressed glTF binary loaded directly in the browser, no external viewer service needed — drag to rotate, scroll to zoom.
Smoothest on desktop. On a slow connection the first load can take a few seconds.
Numbers
- Area
- 0.7 ha
- Photos (captured / reconstructed)
- 100 / 100
- Point cloud (dense)
- 46.2 M
- Ground points (classified)
- 23.7 M
- Flight time
- ~8 min
- Elevation profile
- 475 → 534 m
- GCPs required
- 0 (RTK)
- Precision
- cm-genau
What the client receives
A single delivery contains every format engineering, marketing and government workflows need. You don't need to convert files afterwards or order anything as an add-on — what's captured on the flight day arrives as a complete package. The list below is exactly what came out of this flight.
- Orthomosaic · GeoTIFF, 70 MB
- Full point cloud · LAZ, 46 M points
- Ground-classified point cloud · LAZ, 23.7 M points
- DSM — Digital Surface Model · GeoTIFF
- DTM — Digital Terrain Model · GeoTIFF
- Textured 3D mesh · GLB · OBJ · FBX
- Open processing report (PDF, 20 MB)
Equipment & processing
Which equipment flies and which software processes the data determines the precision and the available delivery formats. On this site, RTK meant no ground control points (GCPs) were needed — what would otherwise cost half a survey day on a standard property.
- DJI Matrice 4T
- RTK GNSS — cm-grade, no GCPs needed
- Standard Processing — included in the package price, no hourly billing
- SMRF ground classification · 'hilly' preset for 60 m relief
Methodology
Captured with a DJI Matrice 4T and RTK GNSS — the drone knows its in-flight position to within a few centimetres. This is the deciding difference vs. consumer drones: without RTK we would have to survey ground control points on site, which costs half a survey day on a standard property. With RTK we fly directly and still deliver cm-grade data — you save the time, the cost, and the logistics of a second surveyor.
100 photos in a single automated grid mission, ~115 m above ground, 80% forward and 70% sideward overlap — the standard parameters for mapping jobs of this size. The mission is pre-planned and runs autonomously: take-off, waypoint flight, landing. The pilot monitors and only intervenes if something unexpected happens.
The 8 minutes of flight time are only the tip. The real workload is a full working day — half a day of preparation, half a day of processing. Preparation means: equipment check, mission planning, weather and NOTAM verification, drive to site, on-site setup, safety briefing, RTK base station configuration, drone assembly, battery rotation, the flight itself, redundant data backup, tear-down, drive back. Processing means: kicking off and supervising the photogrammetric pipeline, quality control of the outputs, double-checking the ground-point classification, packaging the delivery and dispatching it. What the fixed price covers is this full day — not the eight minutes in the air.
The photogrammetric processing — feature extraction from the 100 photos, reconstruction of the 3D geometry, dense point cloud, textured mesh, orthomosaic and ground classification — is included in the Standard Processing package price. You don't get a separate post-production hourly bill. The full evaluation with all parameters and quality metrics is in the processing report (PDF, 20 MB). For jobs with higher precision requirements (cadastral surveying, official submissions), Premium Processing delivers more conservative defaults and a certified report — also as a fixed-price package, no hourly billing.
Open processing report (PDF, 20 MB)What this request would look like in the calculator
If you run the calculator with this flight's parameters, here's what you get. Same engine, same prices — the whole showcase is a quote you can touch.
Inputs
- Project type
- Surveying / Mapping
- Location
- Schweizer Mittelland
- Road distance from Zürich
- 97 km
- Scope
- Up to 5 ha
- Precision
- RTK
- Output
- Plus 3D mesh + ground LAZ
- Spotters
- No, simple operation
- Lead time
- Flexible (>4 weeks)
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