3D Scanning in Berkeley, CA

Berkeley generates a kind of scanning demand that most East Bay cities do not: technical interiors. The research and institutional buildings clustered around the university, and the biotech and instrumentation tenants that spread out from them into the city, run on fit-outs where the constraint is everything above the ceiling and below the slab. Converting a floor to wet lab or adding a piece of equipment means knowing the true slab-to-slab dimension, the exact routing of existing duct, pipe, conduit, and cable tray, the location of shafts and risers, and how much room is actually left in a ceiling plenum that four previous tenants have already used. Hand measurement of that space is slow, incomplete, and wrong in the places it matters. One scan captures the whole congested volume and hands the mechanical engineer a model to route through.

Downtown and along the University and Shattuck corridors, the unreinforced masonry and early concrete buildings that give Berkeley its street wall are being strengthened, re-tenanted, and built above, and structural engineers designing those upgrades want measured wall thicknesses, floor levels, and out-of-plumb data instead of assumptions. The city also sits astride the Hayward fault, which puts a premium on baseline geometry: a scan taken today is the reference a later scan is differenced against, whether the concern is a creeping retaining wall, a settling slab, or movement during adjacent excavation. On the flat west side, the I-80 corridor and its overcrossings, the BART subway alignment under Shattuck, and the Marina and shoreline structures built on filled ground are all control-network scanning work, tied to published benchmarks rather than registered cloud to cloud.

We deliver E57 or RCP point clouds, DWG and DXF plans, sections and elevations, Revit models at the agreed level of development, and clearance or structural products on infrastructure. See our infrastructure scanning, Berkeley as-built surveys, and Berkeley topographic surveys.