Industry
Walk the space once. Leave with every dimension, including the ones you did not know you needed.
This job
Buildings are not square, floors are not level, and nothing built before 1990 matches its drawings.
Manual measurement records what you decided to record. Every return visit for a forgotten dimension costs an hour of travel for two minutes of work, and on an occupied property it costs goodwill as well.
The other trap is compounding error. Room by room measurement accumulates, so a floor plan built from twenty separate room sketches often does not close.
Walk the whole space first, doors open, so you know your route.
Scan in one continuous walk where you can. Through each room, back out, on to the next, closing a loop at the hallway or landing. Continuous capture is what stops room-by-room error accumulating.
Get the awkward things while you are there: under the stairs, inside the cupboard that will become the plant space, behind the appliance you will need to replace.
Check the live preview before you leave. Gaps are cheap to fill while you are standing there and expensive to fill next week.
| Part of the job | Capture with | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Rooms, hallways, stairs | SHARE C1 | Continuous walk, no setups |
| Cupboards, voids, under-stair | SHARE C1 | Light enough for tight access |
| Detail and tight geometry | SHARE C1 | Slow the walk where millimetres matter |
| Exterior, roof, extension footprint | Matrice 4E | Only when the scope goes outside |
A drone has no role inside a house. Fly only when the renovation extends to a roof or an extension footprint that needs site context.
Relative accuracy within a centimetre and cloud thickness within a centimetre is comfortably enough for design and for most fabrication.
What it is not is a set of construction drawings. A point cloud is spatial data. Somebody still has to interpret it into plans, sections and details, and that interpretation is where the judgement lives.
For joinery, cabinetry or anything prefabricated to a tight fit, take confirming measurements at the critical points. The scan tells you where to measure; it does not remove the need to check.
Usually plans and elevations extracted from the cloud, rather than the cloud itself. Most renovation clients cannot open a point cloud and do not want to.
What the cloud gives you is the ability to answer a question three weeks later without going back to site. That is worth more than the initial measurement time it saves.
If you are handing to a designer or draftsperson, ask what they work in before you export.
The space you did not open. The cupboard that turns out to be the only route for services. The subfloor you assumed you could look at later.
Miss it and it stays missing, and on an occupied property the return visit is the expensive part.
The other common one is treating the cloud as a drawing. It is not. It is a measured record that a drawing gets built from, and clients who expect one and receive the other are disappointed for the wrong reason.
One or two kits that fit this job. Family pages cover the rest of the line.
Tell us the job. survey, inspection, mapping, or scanning and we'll spec the right platform, payload, and RTK setup. No guesswork.
