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Check out our YouTube Tutorial on How to 3D Scan As-Builts with Polycam!
Planning an As-Built Capture
First, plan your survey path through the building. For this video, we're going to capture the interior of a three-story residential structure. We'll walk through the space once without retracing our steps. So let's start at the main entranceway, and we're gonna move along the left wall. This left wall trick is a simple way to make sure you record the whole space without having to make any decisions on the fly about where to go next.
Preparing the Space and Device
Before you start, make sure you open all the doors to the rooms that you will want to capture, and make sure your phone is charged. Scanning large spaces can take a lot of battery. If you have an older phone, it may be helpful to close your other apps before starting. And one last tip, put your phone on do not disturb to make sure the scan isn't interrupted by notifications or calls.
Starting the Scan in Polycam
Once everything is ready, open Polycam. Tap the purple plus button in the bottom right to start a new capture. We'll use space mode so that we can generate an accurately scaled instant floor plan and LiDAR mesh at the same time. Aim the camera into the room and click the white button to start recording.
Capturing the Space Accurately
Now move the phone slowly up and down, left and right as you walk around the perimeter of the room hugging the left wall. Remember, Polycam can only build a model out of what you show it, so it's especially important to capture angles around the sides and below objects when scanning room features and furniture like toilets, cabinets, and sinks.
Tracking Coverage and Alignment
Try to fill in all of the purple areas and make sure the white lines follow the corners of the rooms. Make sure to capture the ceiling and floor too. If you don't get everything from every angle, then Polycam will do its best to guess what you haven't captured, but the visuals will be off and both the dimensions and the auto-generated spatial reports will be less accurate. As with everything in life, the key to a good scan is to take your time. The more intentionally and skillfully you scan the space, the higher the accuracy your final result will be.
Recommended Scanning Speed
A good rule of thumb is to take two minutes per a hundred square feet. This residential unit is about fifteen hundred square feet, so I'm gonna take about thirty minutes to capture it really well. It is possible to race through and capture it in a quarter of that time if accuracy and completeness aren't important. But taking a few extra minutes now can save hours or days later on in the process when you don't have to return to the site because you took the time to get a more accurate scan.
Processing the Scan
After you've moved through the whole space, click Process. You can process a scan on your device, which doesn't require an internet connection. This takes a couple minutes for scans under a thousand square feet.
Using Cloud Processing
Or for bigger scans like this one, you can use Polycam's cloud processing feature instead. This uploads all the capture data to Polycam's secure service to process in the background, and it works faster for large scans. That's what I'm gonna do here, and now is also a good time to plug in your phone to recharge it.
Reviewing the Capture
Once the processing is complete, open the capture. Depending on how carefully and skillfully you scanned the space, your capture can achieve ninety-eight percent accuracy in optimal conditions.
Viewing Floor Plans and LiDAR Meshes
See the 3D floor plan with and without furniture or the LiDAR scan. Tap Report to generate a detailed spatial report of the space and to download the PDF of it. Tap Floor Plan to view the automatically generated 2D floor plan, and you can tap Advanced to adjust any of these settings. For example, you can show the interior and exterior measurements. You can turn furniture within the space on or off, show total areas, display the compass, room labels, and even change the wall thickness as well as all the text.
Measuring and Annotating the Space
You could tap Measure to take linear and area measurements of any feature in the space, or tap Auto Measure to generate important measurements automatically. Tap Comments to drop a note on any part of the space for yourself or a colleague to refer to, or tap Share to send a link to the model to anyone's email. Lastly, you can tap Download to export the model in formats compatible with AutoCAD, Revit, SketchUp, and more. We built Polycam to help you deliver better projects. Let us know what features you need next, and happy scanning.