Drone captures cover a site the way a walk-through cannot: the whole footprint, from above, on one date. In SiteView they sit alongside the 360° captures rather than in a separate tool.

Getting to one

Drone Capture appears in the level list in the topbar, as a sibling of the building levels. Choose it and the viewer switches to the drone data for that date. It is also a row of its own in Captures by Area & Date.

Two ways to look at it

• 2D — the orthomosaic, flat and to scale, over a satellite basemap. Pan and zoom.
• 3D — the reconstructed model of the site. Orbit, zoom and pan.

Zooming out far enough leaves the site and shows where it is in the world, which is useful for orientation and for nothing else.

The flight path

Settings › Flight Path draws the route the drone flew across the site. Four controls:

• Show on 2D Viewer — the path over the orthomosaic.
• Show on 3D Viewer — the path through the 3D model.
• GPS Position — where the drone reported it was.
• Computed Position — where processing worked out it actually was.

Turning both positions on at once is the useful trick. Where the two paths separate, the drone’s own GPS and the reconstruction disagree — which is the first thing to look at when a drone dataset does not line up with the rest of the site.

The orthomosaic layer

Settings › Orthomosaic Images turns the flat image layer on and off and sets its opacity, so you can fade it against the basemap or the 3D model underneath.

What a drone project shows in Settings

Fewer categories than a building project, and different ones: Reference Plans, 3D Maps, Orthomosaic Images, Flight Path, Public Share, Integrations. There are no Pano Bubbles because there are no waypoints to show. See Viewer settings.

The DSM

The DSM — digital surface model — renders the site by height instead of by colour, so slopes, mounds and cut faces read at a glance. It comes with an elevation histogram and a range control: narrow the range and the colours spread across the heights you care about instead of across the whole site.

Turn it on from Settings › 3D Maps, or from the DSM entry in the right-click menu.

Ground control points

Where a survey team has placed ground control points, they tie the drone data to real-world position — and they get a category of their own: Settings › Ground Control Points, under Reality Captures, alongside the orthomosaic and the flight path.

Turn it on and each point is drawn on the orthomosaic as a crosshair marker with its label underneath — GCP-01, GCP-02 and so on, in the numbering the survey used. They sit over the imagery rather than in it, so they stay legible as you zoom.

The reason to look at them is agreement. A GCP is a spot whose real coordinate somebody surveyed. If the marker does not land on the painted target in the imagery, the drone dataset is not sitting where the survey says it should — and that is worth knowing before anybody measures off it.

Where the flight path shows its waypoints

On a project with the route recorded, the path is drawn as a numbered run of waypoints — a green Start at 1, each turn numbered along the way, a red End at the last. It is the clearest way to see which parts of a site the flight actually covered, and which it clipped.