Best tablet and workstation for 3D mapping

S&S_Shovelhead · Mar 31, 2017

Hello all,

New member here. I am a professional land surveyor working for a medium sized firm in B.C. canada and am looking to add a uav to do some photogrammetry on small to medium sized jobs.
A large part of what we do is site (topographic) plans for lots that people wish to develop. I would like to use the uav for this. Create a 2d site plan from the ortho images and overlay contours from a dem I create. I'm sure there are a lot of other uses I will find once I get going.
I am going to purchase the phantom 4 pro for my uav and use agisoft photoscan for my post processing and modeling.
I'm looking for recommendations for which tablet I should use and a workstation to run photoscan. Portable would be better for me. I was thinking an ipad mini 4 and a MacBook? What specifications should I look for in a workstation? Also what app do you recommend to run the uav for the photo gathering?

alokbhargava · Mar 31, 2017

If you don't have budget limitations, go for 27" iMac which supports 5K. You can buy FinalCut Pro for image processing.

iPad Mini 4 or iPad Pro 9.7" should be good enough.

ryantrax · Mar 31, 2017

I use an iPad Air 2 with my Inspire 1 Pro. I use a Dell XPS with an i7 with 16GB of RAM and a 4GB graphics card processing with Agisoft.

Jeff · Mar 31, 2017

I use a MSI WT72-6QM to run my Photoscan Pro. You need lots of horse power.

S&S_Shovelhead · Mar 31, 2017

Does anyone find the ipad air too big or do you enjoy the extra screen size?

Is there a specific iMac 27" I should be looking for? Money is a consideration so I would have to be buying used.

What type of specificarios should I look for in a workstation in terms of video card, ram, ECT. I'm fairly illiterate when it comes to computer performance.

DesertRat · Apr 1, 2017

I use an iPad mini 4 and find it to be great for portability, and the screen size to be quite usable. I'm beginning to really like GS Pro for flight planning too. I use a windows laptop for processing with Agisoft Photoscan (Prostar gaming laptop), it has 32Gb RAM and a GTX 970M. With Photoscan, RAM is quite important for processing large projects, I would have a lot of difficulty fitting many of my projects into 16Gb. You can break the project down and process several chunks and merge them latter for larger projects, but it's nice to be able to run things in a single chunk.

With any laptop, make sure it has good ventilation. Most quality gaming laptops do, but I would stay away from any thin, light weight laptops as they usually have sub par cooling. A good Nvidia GPU is also a huge plus with Photoscan. You might also consider an inexpensive desktop, I've had several photoscan projects where the processing took well over 100 hours (archaeological sites, photos taken from the ground). It's nice to be able to run those on a desktop. You can pick up a good desktop with an AMD FX 8350 (8 cores) 32Gb of RAM, and a GTX 1060 for about $800-$900 (not the fastest machine available, but it would work quite well until you could get something better). You can also find some good used Xeon workstation deals on Ebay (probably on laptops too).

MooseMaster05 · Apr 1, 2017

If you don't need a laptop build a desktop. You will get far better performance for the price compared to an off the shelf desktop. It isn't even going to be a contest compared to a laptop. You can build a desktop that will blow away any laptop for far less money. In addition you can build a pc that has everything you want with nothing that you don't want.
It isn't difficult either I built my first pc in about 2 hours

MooseMaster05 · Apr 1, 2017

Not to get in a AMD vs Intel discussion here but I would lean towards an Intel Xeon before an AMD chip. AMD does have 8 core processors for a good price but Intel uses hyperthreading and some other features that result in a lot better performance in benchmark tests compared to AMD processors.