How does a 3D building scan work?

You walk the building methodically and record it with a smartphone, as photos or as video, with each view overlapping the last. A laser scanner is not needed; siteviewer rebuilds the surfaces from your footage.

What does a 3D building scan cost?

The capture needs only equipment you already own. The software is licensed per organisation by the number of people working with it, from €149 excl. VAT a month for Core on annual billing, and the demo runs 30 days at no charge.

What technology does the scan use?

A photo-based method: siteviewer reconstructs the surfaces with 3D Gaussian Splatting from overlapping images. No laser or lidar hardware is involved in producing it.

What do I get from the scan?

A 3D walkthrough that runs in a web browser. You can move through it freely and measure distances, areas and volumes directly in the model.

Is the scan accurate enough for surveying?

Not automatically. It is good enough to plan, coordinate and document, but a dimension you need to guarantee still has to come from survey, scan or CAD data made for that purpose.

3D building scan: how it works and what you get

What a 3D building scan is

A 3D building scan records a building as it stands today, so that you can look at it later as a space rather than as a stack of pictures. You do not get one view of a room. You get the room, and you can walk around in it.

The term covers quite different things. For some people it means a laser scanner on a tripod producing a point cloud; for others it means reconstruction from photographs. Which one is meant decides the equipment, the effort and who is able to do the job at all. siteviewer works from photographs.

How the capture runs

You do it yourself, with what the company already has. A smartphone covers most of it. A drone helps on facades and roofs, and an action cam suits a large hall or a yard where walking with a phone would take too long.

The camera matters less than the coverage. Each view has to overlap the one before it, so the software has something to match. A cramped plant room with pipes at every turn needs a slower, more careful walk than an open warehouse bay, and the walk is the only part of the job that depends on the building.

Going back later is cheap. If one area changes, you record that area alone and it is merged into the existing model; nobody rescans the whole site.

What comes out of it

The scan turns into a 3D walkthrough: a photorealistic model you move through freely in the browser, instead of hopping between fixed viewpoints. The people looking at it install nothing. They can measure in it as well, and the measuring covers distance, area, rectangles, circles and volume.

Accuracy and limits

Use the model to orient, to agree on a plan and to document a state. Do not treat it as a survey. It is not automatically a surveyed result, and for a dimension anyone has to stand behind, or for work in CAD or BIM, you still need data produced for that purpose.

The limits come from the capture. Large blank walls, mirrors and glass, people walking through the shot, changing light, and any space you passed too quickly or could not see all make the reconstruction weaker. Whatever was not recorded is missing from the result, and the model does not flag the gap.

What it costs

The capture costs time, not equipment, because you use what you have and do it yourself. The software is priced by the number of people who work with it — not by floor area and not per site. On annual billing, Core starts at €149 excl. VAT a month, and the demo runs 30 days at no charge.

Pricing explains where Demo, Core and Enterprise differ. Only the extras depend on the building, such as a re-capture after a rebuild, and those we quote after looking at the site.

3D building scan