[Enginerrrd]

Colmap is pretty amazing. It takes about 6-10x longer to run when you max everything out, but it does things no other software has managed to do for me.

That said, I made our drone photogrammetry pipeline with ODM and I wouldn't use colmap.

There's still some annoying things that no software can seem to do: with a single camera, I'd love to create a 3D map of a road. But no matter how much overlap of photos I get, (I mounted a stabilized GoPro to a truck and took video, than pulled together geotagged stills) for some reason I could never get a good point cloud out of that data. Even colmap. Colmap does it's absolute best if you walk around in a circle with a common central point of focus. It's frustrating because I KNOW the 3D information is there. I can see it. Plenty of features to match. But for some reason this seems to be a hard task for current SFM libraries.

[pierotofy]

I can chime in on the road: there's probably insufficient color variation and that gets filtered out during patch-match. You can relax the NCC Threshold parameter and you should be able to reconstruct the road (you'll also get more outliers in other areas though). There might be an option in COLMAP to do that. In ODM you need to modify the fNCCThresholdKeep parameter in OpenMVS (you'll need to recompile OpenMVS).

[Enginerrrd]

That's an interesting idea. I'm a bit skeptical though, since these were dirt and gravel forest roads with lots of different colors and apparent features.