What Your Team Can Do With a Building Scan
Heritage professionals, restoration architects, museum curators, and property owners — a single point cloud drives every downstream deliverable:
Heritage Preservation Documentation
Complete geometric record of a building at a moment in time. Serves as permanent archive for museums, universities, historical societies, and heritage registries — provincial, national, and UNESCO.
Restoration & Rehabilitation Design
Design retrofits, repairs, and rehabilitation work against actual as-built geometry. Custom-fabricate replacement stone, timber, or ornamental elements to fit exactly what's there.
Adaptive Reuse Planning
Converting a warehouse to lofts? A church to a community space? A bank to a restaurant? Design the new function around the constraints of the old structure with millimetre precision.
Structural & Condition Assessment
Baseline geometry for structural engineers to plan retrofits, seismic upgrades, or insurance-required assessments. Compare captures over time to detect settlement, deformation, or damage.
Insurance & Risk Documentation
Pre-loss condition record for high-value historic properties. Baseline before major renovations. Documentation of significant architectural features for replacement cost calculations and recovery planning.
Educational & Public Access
Virtual walkthroughs for heritage sites, museum exhibits, university teaching materials, and public interpretation. Share the building with audiences who can't visit in person — or with future generations.
Convex Geoportal — Your Secure Workspace
Every scan we produce is delivered to Convex Geoportal — your password-protected workspace where architects, engineers, contractors, curators, and stakeholders access the point cloud in a browser. Measure, cross-section, annotate, and share findings without anyone having to install specialized software. The public viewer above is a preview; the portal adds the full toolset your project team needs day-to-day.
Cross-Sections & Slice Planes
Cut horizontal or vertical slices anywhere in the building. Extract 2D sections for design review, elevation profiles, or floor plans on demand — without going back to site.
Precise Measurement Tools
Distance, area, coordinate, and elevation measurements down to the point cloud's accuracy limit. Verify heights, spans, thicknesses, and clearances from anywhere.
Multi-Epoch Comparison
Re-scan the building before, during, and after restoration. Compare captures side-by-side to document what changed, verify workmanship, and record the completed project.
Annotations & Markups
Pin notes to any feature. Attach photos of damage, decisions from stakeholder meetings, or references to historic photographs. Create issue-tracking that follows the geometry.
Saved Views & Bookmarks
Capture specific angles for restoration review, funding presentations, or public interpretation. Share views with stakeholders so everyone opens the model at the right spot.
Team Access Control
Invite architects, contractors, curators, funders, and consultants with the access level they need. Audit log tracks every login and action. Add or revoke access at any time.
Frequently Asked Questions
How is 3D scanning better than measured drawings for historic buildings?
Measured drawings capture specific dimensions selected by the person doing the measuring. A 3D scan captures the entire geometry — every carved detail, every out-of-plumb wall, every decorative element — whether or not anyone thought to measure it at the time. Weeks later, when a restoration architect needs a dimension nobody wrote down, they extract it directly from the scan. And if the building is ever damaged or lost, the scan is the permanent record.
Is handheld SLAM scanning non-intrusive?
Completely. The operator walks through the space with a handheld scanner. Nothing is attached to walls, ceilings, or floors. No drilling, no scaffolding, no ladders (unless needed for high-ornamentation coverage). The building's fabric is untouched. This makes SLAM the right tool for sensitive heritage interiors, museums with artifacts in place, and buildings where anything more intrusive would require conservation review.
How long does it take to scan a historic building?
A single-storey building of ~500 m² is typically captured in 1–2 hours on site. A large church, courthouse, or multi-storey heritage building in one day. Weeks-long manual measured surveys are replaced by a single-day site visit, delivering more geometric information than any measured drawing could capture.
What accuracy can I expect?
Typical relative accuracy is 3–8 cm across normal building scales — enough for restoration design, adaptive reuse planning, and heritage documentation. Absolute accuracy (georeferenced) is 5–15 cm with control targets. For projects requiring tighter accuracy on specific features (custom stonework replacement, high-precision replication), we can supplement SLAM with terrestrial scanning or total-station spot checks.
What does my team receive?
RGB-coloured point clouds in LAS/LAZ and E57 formats for CAD, BIM, and archival use. Web-optimized 3D Tiles for browser streaming. A capture summary report with control notes and accuracy documentation. All provisioned to Convex Geoportal — where your team, contractors, architects, and stakeholders access the model from any browser.
Do you scan buildings other than historic ones?
Yes. The same handheld SLAM workflow captures oil and gas facilities, refineries, industrial plants, warehouses, underground mines, and any indoor or no-fly-zone site. Historic buildings are a natural showcase because they demand non-intrusive, detailed capture, but the technology applies wherever drones can't fly and total stations take too long.
What does it cost?
SLAM surveys are more affordable than most heritage professionals expect — often less than the alternative of a multi-week manual measured survey by an architectural firm. Pricing depends on building size, complexity, and level of detail required. Multi-building programs (heritage districts, campus surveys) reduce per-building cost significantly. Contact us with your project details and we'll quote within one business day.
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