When we were asked to capture both the interior and exterior of Ely Cathedral in its truest form for a COVID-19-safe Christmas concert, The Virtulab team was more than up for the challenge. Now that we have launched our Virtuscan and Virtuplan services, this case study represents the perfect example of how drone mapping can be used.
The project
Pixie Lott, Yury Revich and many more musical acts were performing a Christmas concert at Ely Cathedral. Our brief was to drone map and capture the Cathedral, and provide the client with a high-resolution model presenting it in its true form. Secondly, our footage and data was also used in the marketing campaign for an upcoming event at the Cathedral later that year.
The drone mapping
In order to achieve the amount of detail we needed, it took us around two full days to capture, followed by four days of processing to the level of photogrammetry we needed. It is important to take your time during this aerial survey to ensure everything that is captured is of the highest quality, without shadows and light changes negatively affecting the imagery.
The biggest part of executing a project on this scale is planning. The time it takes doesn’t allow for much space to make mistakes and redo work, amongst other considerations. We had to ensure we had airspace clearances, and we needed to notify and get permission from everyone who could be in the vicinity of the drone operations. Since we were conducting our drone mapping during the summer months, a lot of foot traffic was expected in the immediate area. With our permissions from the CAA and choosing the right equipment, we were able to complete our task effectively and efficiently, even with the challenge of the complexity of the site.
We also ensured considerations were in place for the size of the team on site, and their allocation to specific roles to minimise risk throughout.
The Processing
After capturing a high volume of both ground-based and aerial drone photography, the imagery was analysed and made ready for 3D processing. All the individual chunks of this aerial survey were run through photogrammetry software to give us the initial building blocks to start merging a model. Tying all of these loose bits and pieces of footage together called for a lot of manual work, looking for key features in corresponding images that would allow the software to align them with one another.
From there dense processing was activated. This produces the initial main point cloud model, which is basically a very dense digital representation of the structure with the points of data very close together. Every one of these points would contain geo-referenced, as well as colour, information. Ely Cathedral had around 3 billion points of information!
Our closing steps were to join all of these points together, essentially texturising the model. This provides a ‘blanket’ over the model to create a photo quality that can be used for true inspection.
Virtuscan & Virtuplan
This project used a suite of our Virtuservices. One aspect many businesses don’t consider is the sheer size of this data. When you need a point cloud, like the one we described creating above, that weighs 36 GB (for example), most computing systems would simply not be able to handle it. That’s where Virtuscan comes in! As long as you have this product and an internet connection you can inspect and manipulate your data with ease.
When it comes to the utility of Virtuscan, you are only limited by your imagination. We have worked with everything from survey and inspection data, all the way through to large-scale aerial mapping and high-resolution map data. Basically, if you can visually capture your subject matter, you can work with presenting it in Virtuscan.
If you don’t have something that can be captured visually yet, we have something for that too! Virtuplan is a rapid deployment and scene-creation tool for every size site or piece of infrastructure. Virtuplan allows you to build it digitally first for better results.
To find out more about Virtuscan and Virtuplan, or to request a quote, get in touch today!