One capture pipeline: a phone, a supported drone, or a 360 camera
Most capture tools start by asking what gear you own. That question is backwards. The job is the property in front of you, and the right capture device is whatever gets you a complete, well-exposed set of images of it — which changes site to site, and sometimes hour to hour.
Universal ingest flips the order. You capture with whatever is in your hand — a phone on a walk-around, a drone for the roof and the parts you can't reach, a 360 camera for an interior — and one pipeline reconstructs all of it into the same scene. The device becomes a detail, not a decision you're locked into for the life of an account.
Where each input shines
A phone is the fastest path to a usable scene. It's always with you, it shoots clean frames, and for a single elevation or a quick interior it's often all you need. The tradeoff is reach: you can't get the phone over the ridgeline of a two-story roof.
A drone earns its place exactly there — overhead and oblique angles, tall structures, anything you'd otherwise need a ladder for. The platform treats the drone as one more source of frames, so you're not running a separate workflow for the aerial set and the ground set.
A 360 camera fills in volume quickly indoors, where the geometry wraps around you and a narrow field of view would mean hundreds of overlapping shots. Use it for walk-throughs and interiors; lean on the phone or drone for the detail that needs resolution.
Why the seam matters
The reason to keep all of this in one pipeline isn't tidiness — it's that the seams between tools are where capture jobs go wrong. Re-exporting between apps loses metadata, breaks scale, and turns a one-hour job into an afternoon of file wrangling.
When every input lands in the same reconstruction, the GPS and device-pose hints travel with the frames, the scene is consistent, and you spend your time on the capture instead of the conversion. The complexity of fusing different sensors lives in the engine; the surface you touch stays a single obvious path.
Keep reading
Gaussian splats vs photogrammetry: two outputs from one capture
A splat is the scene you walk through; a photogrammetry mesh and point cloud are what you measure on. You shouldn't have to choose — here's why you get both.
Read the post →What “survey-grade” actually means — and its tiers
“Survey-grade” gets stamped on a lot of deliverables that haven't earned it. Accuracy is a tier that comes from your inputs, not a label the software grants.
Read the post →Ready to turn a capture into a job?
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