Drone Mapping the Carolina Beach North End Pier

The North End Pier at Carolina Beach is a weathered wooden structure that's been taking waves for decades. It's one of the more photogenic structures on the Cape Fear coast because of the way the pilings cast shadows into the surf and the deck cuts a hard line across the ocean horizon. This video is a timelapse of the drone passes we flew to capture imagery for a 3D photogrammetry model of the pier — not the finished model itself, but the raw image capture that feeds it.

How Photogrammetry Works

Photogrammetry works by taking dozens or hundreds of photos of a structure from different angles and elevations, then stitching them into a textured 3D mesh. For a pier, that means flying parallel passes along the deck at multiple heights — low enough to capture the railing and bench details, high enough to get the full deck and roof structure in frame. Every pass overlaps the previous one by about 70% so the software has enough tie points to reconstruct the geometry.

What you're seeing in this video is those passes compressed into a fast timelapse. The drone moves along the pier axis, cuts back to the start, drops or rises in elevation, and flies again. We're building 3D models of coastal structures like this as part of our documentation work — piers, towers, buildings — for clients who need accurate structural reference, measurement data, or visual records before renovation or demolition. The same workflow applies to architectural documentation, as-built surveys, and site documentation.