Once your photogrammetry has finished processing in Terrain Creator, you'll need to transfer your drone data to the Virtual Surveyor app to begin the actual survey work. You have two options:

  • Survey a Single Moment in Time: Use the Open in Virtual Surveyor button to survey a single moment in time for a specific area. 
  • Compare Surveys Over Time: Select the To Existing button to add an additional dataset of an area you’ve previously surveyed in order to compare changes over time.


Open in Virtual Surveyor button found in the Terrain Creator app ribbon.



Overview


Start Your Survey

After you click on the Open in Virtual Surveyor button, your project will open in the Virtual Surveyor app and you can create your survey on a dataset for the moment in time the drone was flown. The project will have the same file name as the one you used in Terrain Creator and the date of the drone data is automatically added as the name of the Terrain State.


Use the Open in Virtual Surveyor button to move the processed drone data into Virtual Surveyor as .ei (DSM) and .ii (Orthomosaic) files.


Start your survey. With your project open in the Virtual Surveyor app, you are now ready start work and create your survey. 


Accessing data files. You can access your data files using Ctrl+E in the Terrain Creator app.


Examples of surveys for a single moment in time: 


Compare Surveys Over Time

You can create a timeline of datasets that were flown over the same area on different dates to easily compare changes across your surveys over time. First, you'll need to have the Virtual Surveyor app running with an open project, then you can use the To Existing button to transfer the newly created DSM and Orthophoto over to Virtual Surveyor. 


Switch over to the Virtual Surveyor app. After using the To Existing button, switch over to your open Virtual Surveyor project. Once you are in the Virtual Surveyor app, you will see your Elevation and Image Terrain files are shown in the Project View under No Layer. 


Use To Existing (button name changes depending on what project is open in the Virtual Surveyor app) to create a new Terrain State for an open project in Virtual Surveyor.


Compare over time. You can see that your drone dataset has merged into a new Terrain State by the date the drone was flown. Each dataset you transfer from Terrain Creator to the Virtual Surveyor app creates a new moment in time that you can survey and compare changes with other Terrain States on the timeline.


Examples of projects you can compare over time: 


Important! You will get an error if the newly added dataset falls outside of the existing project area.


Note: If the transferred dataset is in a different coordinate system, Virtual Surveyor will reproject the data on-the-fly to the preexisting project coordinate system.