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This looks like a cool project! I'd be willing to help out with some of the development if needed. Hopefully you can get your hands on some LIDAR point data or maybe someone has a friend at a surveying company that would be willing to help out with a scan!

I had been waiting for the DJI Mini 3 to be released, now it's the trouble of finding one in stock

Didn't want to go though the trouble of getting recertified on a borrowed 250+ gram drone with the new sub 250g one having almost the same sensor with none of the extra flight restrictions.

Still have my fingers crossed the point cloud John spoke of is still kicking around. Maybe we just tape a new iPhone to a selfie stick and sweep the whole bloody thing like a metal detector

I believe Reinaldo Varela has the elevation data.

I'll ask next time I see him out there, thanks!

Unfortunate blow to progression, probably have to get my UAV cert updated, there's no SDK to run virtual sticks for the Mini 3 yet and I don't intend to take thousands of photos from different altitudes and angles manually

*Thought about it a bit, the PPI licensing is pretty cheap (~$40 for 5000 x 12MP) and the initial tests from Michael's video were very promising despite not being purpose taken for photogrammetry. Couldn't hurt to do a manual flight capture of the whole track with less than the intended final source photo count and see what areas are difficult to align, where I might need to place my ground control points for later. At least have a data set squared away to make a "proper" v0.1

Mini 3's multi chargers have been backordered for far too long

Mini 2 being ~90% the photo quality (biggest difference is viewed in the sharpness of distant objects, lucky me if no one is on track I can hover low where there is little difference) plus a decent discount for the complete kit with a way to fly programmed missions stopping and taking photos along the way automatically...

Charging them batteries up, Tuesday late morning I'll be out

If my shoulder keeps being a pain and I don't drive I'll still stick around for regular T&T and shoot some video (provided the practice grid at the time unanimously agree to allow me to fly nearby)

Sun got to me today didn't stick around for T&T.

I tossed the manual flight images into the software the moment I got home and did the really basic "align" without any manually specified ground control points (I'll start working on them this evening)
Then simply hitting the default automate all the steps and see what happens while I took a shower gave me this. Ignore the wavy ocean like mesh, that's a product of not enough manual alignment, RAW photo balancing, deleting errant points and the rest of the manual work still to come. Things like the barriers and marshal huts will have to be modeled outside of photogrammetry as it doesn't like generating those things in a "clean" manner. Also "cheaper" on performance to turn them into 4 sided boxes with some fancy textures/normal maps
Little bit of distracted manual refinement, going to need that round 2 of source photos with more stringent gimbal pitch / flight altitude to get "further"
The geometry is there, but I think I'll need some terrestrial photos or at least something under 50m altitude to get any texture detail

I'll need that round 2 data set but in the meantime practicing the workflow and learning.

This screen capture is from within the game engine's 3D editor (it takes the track object files I create with the photogrammetry and blender and helps finalize and convert it into something the game will be able to load) These two are from within the game it's self!! The shader settings (what controls lighting and shadows and the current washed out look) I simply plugged in some basic "defaults". Loaded it all up excited to realize I messed up by a decimal on the output scaling and the kart was "broken" and several factors too small

Oh boy, something that loads! (If you own Assetto Corsa and would like this alpha map you're welcome to to try it, I would love the feedback!! To cut down on google drive spam bots private message me and I'll be happy to share the karts/track files)
Road is very bumpy and hard to grip up on, textures and normal map are a blobby shadowed mess scattered across the ground but the new asphalt spots are there and visible and in future iterations we can add in a pseudo way of rubbering in and adding grip feel feedback though those areas and lines. There's some bad seams on my part between mesh parts causing the physics to launch you into the stratosphere in a couple of spots, but the scale... the scale

Through the VR headset already feels damn near 95-98% of the way there. The sim kart I'm driving there is closer to a VLR100 than the briggs I'm used too but it all feels "correct" so far

*oops this is why I'm testing, looks like I smoothed instead of de-noised on the z axis and the height difference between the highest and lowest points of the track might be off by ~10%. Something to note for next time..

**EDIT** - I realized the gif previews were rather large and getting some traffic, don't want to eat up all Dave's bandwidth allocation for the site imgur links below.
https://imgur.com/a/6KXdzyf
https://imgur.com/MBKMDEu
https://imgur.com/a/NFwNX8a

Did a bit of texture and height fixing
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gzRQVa73oQ

Been a little while since an update, I've gotten back to modeling and reaching a point where I need some feedback before I proceed.

I ended up having to retopologize the photogrammetry model entirely into something more workable. In doing so I've set my self up for a much easier time on the Sim racing side of things but a little worse off on the 3D modeling side. Thus I wanted to poll the community to get a better idea of my path forward and feel out if the extra work is sought after or not.

https://forms.gle/CTnp7KbBLYFXnuHn7

Pretty amazing stuff! Great work!