Polycam blog

A listing floor plan has to look good enough to publish and carry a square footage figure that survives an appraisal. Compare CubiCasa, Polycam, Matterport and drawing it yourself.

How much paint you need comes down to getting the wall area right, and most people guess or wrestle with a tape measure. A room scan gives you the figure with the openings already subtracted.

Whether a piece of furniture works comes down to two numbers, and neither is the room's overall size. This guide covers the inscribed dimension and the narrowest opening on the route.

Walk each room slowly with a LiDAR phone and the app builds a floor plan as you go, which takes an afternoon for a typical house. What you can do with that plan depends on your subscription.

Getting a room onto a headset takes one of three routes, and the one you need depends on the headset your audience already owns. Here is what each route costs you in export work.

Interior designers usually need two plans: one that records the room as it is, and one that shows clients what it could become. Compare Polycam, RoomSketcher, and magicplan.

Facilities teams scan for four reasons: area records, designer handoffs, condition reports, and sharing. Compare Polycam and magicplan on which job each one handles better.

A digital twin needs the assets inside a room, not just its walls. Here is what to capture before you scan, what to tag by hand, and which export each platform expects.

Angled walls, alcoves, and curved bays break most floor plan apps. Compare Polycam, magicplan, RoomSketcher, and CubiCasa on how they handle geometry that is not square.

Drone footage on an SD card is useless until something turns it into a model. Compare Polycam, DroneDeploy, and PIX4Dcapture Pro on what each one does from a phone.

The tools you need for as-built documentation depend on where the data ends up. Compare capture software, conversion steps, and CAD or BIM destinations.

Construction sites need three kinds of 3D work: progress walkthroughs, aerial captures, and interior scans. Compare Polycam, OpenSpace, Cupix, and DroneDeploy on cost and workflow.

Converting photos and sketches into editable floor plans saves hours of manual drafting. Compare Polycam, CubiCasa, magicplan, and RoomSketcher on inputs, exports, and turnaround.

Digitizing furniture means balancing mesh fidelity, texture quality, and file size. Compare Polycam, KIRI Engine, Luma AI, and Scaniverse for e-commerce and design work.

Construction sites have two kinds of scanning work, and they suit different tools. Compare handheld scanners and phone LiDAR on speed, skill, and harsh site conditions.

Dust creates false points and mud changes the surface you are measuring. Learn how to plan scans around site conditions, silica rules, and device protection.

Stairs are heavily regulated and hard to measure by hand. Learn what dimensions to capture, how to scan them, and where building code still demands a tape measure.

Stairwells are narrow, dark, and repetitive, so most scans fail the same five ways. This guide shows each mistake, why it happens, and how to avoid it.

AI floor plan tools turn hand sketches, PDFs, and phone scans into scaled base models. See how designers import verified room proportions into Canva, SketchUp, and Morpholio Board.

Field teams off-grid cannot wait on cloud processing. Compare Polycam, Scaniverse, and WebODM on offline capture, on-device processing, and storage.

Access to a heritage building is short, so you get one window to capture it. Learn how to choose the standard, plan sessions, and pair LiDAR with photogrammetry.

Emailing a point cloud across time zones costs a day for every misunderstanding. Share a cloud link and saved views so reviewers land on the exact spot.

Apartment as-builts need a measured floor plan for every unit, not millimeter precision. Compare phone LiDAR, Leica, Matterport, SLAM, and CubiCasa.

Documenting an occupied building is a scheduling and privacy problem, not a measuring one. Here is a phone-based protocol that keeps disruption to minutes.

Speed on a site visit is really about avoiding return trips. Compare Polycam, Scaniverse, Matterport Mobile, and Canvas on capture and processing speed.

Small AEC teams don't need $4,000-a-year mapping suites. Compare budget-friendly options from Polycam to free open-source photogrammetry.

A five-stage 3D scanning workflow that keeps architects from missing a crucial dimension, from capture planning to CAD and BIM handoff.

Turn a flat floor plan into a 3D home layout with an AI digitizer, a phone scan, or CAD. A beginner-friendly comparison of all three routes.

Mobile scanning and drone mapping each excel at different parts of a roof inspection. This guide shows when to use each method.

Full-stack drone mapping suites are overkill for most small AEC firms. Compare lighter tools that cover roofs, interiors, and floor plans.

Reflective surfaces confuse every 3D scanner. This guide covers the practical fixes, from matting sprays to capture technique.

Clear capture patterns for every scenario — interior rooms, multi-story stairwells, exterior facades, heritage sites, and stitching across sessions.

The four main reality capture methods — terrestrial LiDAR, mobile LiDAR, photogrammetry, and drone — what each does, and how firms build a stack around them.

Speed, cost, and workflow first, then an honest look at the accuracy numbers — and the specific projects where FARO Focus precision is worth the price over a phone.

A side-by-side look at Polycam and OpenSpace for construction reality capture — what each captures, how the workflows differ, and when to run them together.

Both start from the same 3D scan but deliver very different things. Here's how to tell whether your project needs a CAD drawing, a data-rich BIM model, or both.