What is a 3D walkthrough?

A photorealistic reconstruction of a real building that runs in a web browser. You move through it freely rather than jumping between fixed viewpoints, so the space between the places someone photographed is there too.

How is a 3D walkthrough made?

From overlapping photos and video of the actual rooms. You walk the building with a smartphone, add a drone for facades and roofs if those matter, and we reconstruct the model from that footage.

What does a 3D walkthrough cost?

Capture costs you equipment time, not equipment: you use what the company already owns. siteviewer itself is licensed per organisation by the number of people working with it, from €149 excl. VAT a month for Core on annual billing. The demo runs 30 days at no charge.

How is a 3D walkthrough different from a 360-degree tour?

A 360-degree tour puts the viewer on fixed panorama points and jumps between them. A 3D walkthrough reconstructs the space in between as well, so intermediate positions and unplanned viewing angles hold up.

Do I need special hardware?

No. A smartphone covers interiors, a drone covers facades and roofs, an action cam covers large areas - equipment most companies already have. There is nothing to buy before you start.

3D walkthrough: how it works, what it costs

What it is

A 3D walkthrough is a photorealistic model of a real building that you move through in a web browser. Nothing is modelled by hand: the geometry and the surfaces come from photographs of the rooms as they stood on the day of capture, with the wear, the stacked pallets and the cable trays still in place.

That is the difference from a rendering, and it is also the difference from a photo gallery. A gallery shows you what the photographer chose to show. A walkthrough lets you go and look at the thing nobody thought to photograph.

How one is made

You capture the building yourself. Walk it with a smartphone the way a visitor would, keeping the camera moving and the coverage overlapping; add a drone where facades and roofs matter, or an action cam for a large hall. Nothing needs to be bought for this.

From that footage we reconstruct the model. What comes back is a site you can enter at any point, not a sequence of stops.

Keeping it current is the part people underestimate. When one production cell is rebuilt or a storage bay is re-laid, you record that area alone with a phone, and it is merged into the existing model — the rest of the building stays as it was. The method is the same whether you are capturing a single bay or an entire hall; only the length of the walk changes.

The step-by-step process covers who decides what, and when.

What people use it for

The common thread is distance: someone needs to understand a building they are not standing in.

Distributed teams argue about the same space instead of three different mental pictures of it. New staff learn the site before their first shift. A customer or an applicant sees the areas you have cleared for them, and only those. A state is documented on a given date, so a later dispute has something to point at. And vacant floor space can be shown to a prospective tenant on a Sunday evening.

The solutions overview sorts these by what each one actually requires.

3D walkthrough or 360-degree tour?

A 360-degree tour is a set of panoramas with jumps between them. Where you can stand is decided in advance, and so is what you can see from there.

A 3D walkthrough reconstructs the volume between those points, which is why you can stop halfway down an aisle, look under a conveyor, or back off to see a hall end to end. For a guided presentation with a handful of agreed stations, a 360-degree tour is often enough and costs less to produce. For anything where the question is how a place actually fits together, it is not.

Product and technology sets the two methods against each other in detail.

What it costs

Capture costs you time rather than money, because you use the equipment you already have and do it yourself.

siteviewer is licensed for your whole organisation and priced by the number of people who work with it — the number of sites you hold does not change the figure. On annual billing, Core starts at €149 excl. VAT a month and Enterprise is agreed case by case; the demo runs 30 days at no charge, so you can judge the result before anything is signed.

Pricing lays out the three tiers. Only the extras depend on the building — a re-capture after a rebuild, or an introduction session for your team — and we deliberately quote those after looking at the site rather than before.

Where it ends

A 3D walkthrough is not a surveyed CAD or BIM model. You can measure in it — distance, area, rectangles, circles and volume — and that is enough to plan a route or check whether a machine fits. It is not enough to warrant a dimension in a contract; that needs survey data produced for the purpose.

Only what was captured appears. Locked rooms, covered zones and the space behind a stacked rack are absent, and nothing in the model invents them.

And a walkthrough shows one date. After a change that matters, the affected area needs recapturing — which is cheap, and the reason the model stays useful for years rather than months.