Polycam blog

A listing's floor plan and the lease's rentable square footage are two different numbers. Here is how to scan an office in an afternoon and export a plan you can publish.

The right tool depends on how many walls you need and what the numbers are for. A single scan captures every wall height in a room; tape and laser still have their place.

Basements and mechanical rooms are the spaces AEC teams most need to document and the hardest to scan. LiDAR keeps working in the dark where photogrammetry struggles.

A licensed architect scanned a whole house in about an hour, where measuring by hand would have taken sixteen. Here is how agents capture a listing, check the floor plan, and publish it.

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.

Guessing whether furniture fits is how moving day goes wrong, and a scan takes the doubt out of it. Measure the new room, your furniture, and every opening the piece has to pass through.

Your phone can give you a single distance or a complete room record, depending on which mode you use. This guide explains the difference and how to capture a room accurately the first time.

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.

Listing photos show how a room looks, not how large it is, and no app recovers measurements from them. Here is what does produce a square footage figure and why the numbers go wrong.

Insurers want a home inventory, and a floor plan scan supports it without replacing it. Here is what each document covers, how to capture the house, and where to keep the record.

Portfolio records outlive individual tenancies, so what you capture matters as much as how often. This guide covers a repeatable per-unit record and explains which app fits which team.

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.

A floor plan in the listing carousel answers the questions guests ask before they book. Compare the tools hosts actually use, what each one produces, and what it costs across a portfolio.

Appraisers measure with ANSI Z765-2021, and your listing figure has to survive that comparison. Here is how each measurement tool works and where its results will differ from the appraisal.

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.