Industry

Heritage and documentation

A permanent record of the fabric as it stands. Walk the interior, fly the roof.

Commissioned in Melbourne
12-month warranty
Product setup support

This job

Recording fabric before it changes

Heritage documentation is the measured record of a structure or site at a point in time, made because the fabric will change, degrade or be worked on.

It supports conservation management plans, condition monitoring, reconstruction after damage, and the statutory record that has to exist before consent is granted for works.

Unlike most surveys, the deliverable often has no immediate practical use. Its value is that it exists in thirty years.

What makes heritage capture difficult

Access is the constant constraint. Fragile floors, restricted hours, scaffolding you cannot touch, and often a curator who is reasonably nervous about anyone with equipment.

Detail expectations are high and unevenly distributed. Nobody cares about the storeroom. Everybody cares about the carved detail on the entry, and the tolerance on the two is not the same.

And there is usually something below ground that matters: earlier foundations, burials, filled voids, a demolished wing. Geometry above ground does not tell you about any of it.

How the day actually runs

Agree the scope of significance first. Which elements are the reason this record exists, and what tolerance do they need.

Walk the interior in continuous segments, closing loops at circulation spaces. Slow the walk where detail matters.

Fly the roof, upper facades and site context with RTK, which also gives you real-world coordinates to bring the interior onto.

Record what you did, not just what you got. Heritage records are used by people who were not there, so capture date, method, equipment and coverage extent belong in the deliverable.

What to fly, what to walk

Part of the site	Capture with	Why
Interiors, rooms, stairs	SHARE C1 or C1 Pro	Walk-through, no tripods on fragile floors
Carved and moulded detail	SHARE C1 (slow walk) or TLS	Where tolerance is tighter than a normal SLAM pace
Roof, chimneys, upper facades	Matrice 4E	Safe access without scaffolding
Site context and curtilage	Matrice 4E	RTK positioned, ties everything together

Handheld and aerial cover the fabric you can walk or fly. Subsurface work is out of scope on this page.

What the record has to hold

Relative accuracy within a centimetre and cloud thickness within a centimetre suit whole-building documentation and condition recording.

Where the brief calls for millimetre detail on specific elements, SLAM is the wrong tool for those elements. Use terrestrial scanning or close-range photogrammetry on the handful of things that need it, and handheld for the other ninety percent of the building.

Record your method and coverage. A heritage record that does not state how it was made is much harder for a future user to trust.

What gets handed over

A registered point cloud, orthographic elevations and sections, and often a written record of method and coverage. Increasingly a MapShare link as well, so trustees and committees who will never open CAD can look at it. MapShare Studio for 12 months is included with every SHARE C1 and C1 Pro.

Recipients are conservation architects, heritage consultants and statutory bodies. They care about completeness and provenance more than about visual polish.

What gets it questioned: undated records, no stated method, and coverage claims the data does not support.

The common miss

Recording the fabric and not the context. The building without the curtilage, the interior without the roof.

The other one is over-promising on detail. A handheld cloud is excellent for the whole building and inadequate for a carved capital. Say which is which before you quote, not after.

And because heritage records are used decades later by people who were not there, undocumented gaps are worse here than anywhere else.

Start with these

One or two kits that fit this job. Family pages cover the rest of the line.

SHARE C1 Pro

NTRIP RTK handheld. Absolute coords when you need them.

Dual 1" mechanical shutter
Built-in RTK
Sub 5 cm absolute

From$9,887 to $10,849

View kit

SHARE C1

Walk through. Walk out with a model.

Software and training included
Global shutter colour
Under 1 cm relative

From$7,662 to $9,736

View kit

Choosing a model

Is handheld scanning accurate enough for heritage work?

For whole-building documentation and condition recording, yes. Relative accuracy better than a centimetre with cloud thickness within a centimetre suits plans, sections, elevations and change monitoring. For individual elements needing millimetre detail, such as carving or tooling marks, use terrestrial scanning or close-range photogrammetry on those elements specifically and handheld for the rest of the building.

Accuracy

Can I use this to monitor change over time?

Yes, and it is one of the strongest uses. Capture on the same method and the same control at intervals, then compare clouds. Movement, deflection and material loss show up as measurable difference. The key is consistency: same coordinate system, documented method, and enough overlap in coverage that you are comparing like with like.

Workflow & data

Can trustees and committees view this without CAD?

Yes. Publish the cloud or model to MapShare so anyone with the link can navigate the record in a browser with no account and no CAD install. That matters in heritage work more than in most sectors, because the people who commission and govern these records rarely have CAD on their machines. Every SHARE C1 and C1 Pro sale includes 12 months of MapShare Studio.

In the field

Will it damage anything or need to touch the fabric?

No. Handheld SLAM is non-contact and requires no targets, tripods or fixings, which is a large part of why it suits heritage interiors. Nothing is mounted to the fabric and nothing is placed on fragile floors beyond the operator walking through.

Support

What should the record include so it is still useful in thirty years?

Capture date, method, equipment, coordinate system, control used, and an explicit statement of coverage extent and known gaps. A cloud without provenance is much harder for a future user to rely on. We cover documentation practice as part of handover for heritage clients.

Next step

From raw data to signed-off outputs

Orthos, point clouds, thermal reports, and BIM-ready exports — tell us what you're producing and we'll wire the right capture and processing stack.