Agisoft Metashape is a digital photogrammetry software application that is used for turning drone-collected photographs into high-quality maps and 3D models. This exercise will walk through the basics of how to use Metashape.

Aligning the photos to create an inital stereo model and sparse point cloud is the first step in Metashape. In this lab, we explore the different options for aligning photos and how to optimize the sparse point cloud.

Not drones, but still cool! You can use the same structure-from-motion software we use to process drone imagery to create 3D models from overlapping photographs of an object.

While most photogrammetry projects may only need data from one point in time, there are many instances where you want to track change over time. With high-resolution, 3D drone imagery, coregistering the 3D models and image products from different time periods is very important, but can also be very challenging. This exercise walks through a few different approaches to coregistering 3D models and orthomosaics in Metashape.

Metashape is great when you have well-behaved photos. When you don’t, it can be super frustrating. While not every image set can be successfully aligned in Metashape, there are some strategies for manually aligning photos if they don’t want to align.