In December 2022, Historic Oakland Foundation asked me to make a 3D drone scan of Atlanta's historic cemetery. It's one of the largest greenspaces and oldest sites in the city. Scanning 70,000 gravesites over 48 acres took days of flying a Matrice M300 camera drone over every foot of the grounds from multiple angles. I shot 12,000 photographs in the end. It turned out to be impossible to process the half terrabyte of data I wound up with into a 3D model, at least with the photogrammetry tools available just a few years ago. I let the data sit and waited for the software to catch up. In 2026, advances in 3D gaussian splatting and the arrival of agentic coding tools that can run on their own for weeks led me to try again. The source model is astonishingly complex, with 173 million gaussians in it.
https://www.joelsilverman.com/blog/gaussianograph-oakland-cemetery