3D Scanning in Kensington, CA

Kensington is small, unincorporated, and almost entirely steep. Lots were platted onto the hillside in the 1920s and 1930s, so parcels are short and narrow, houses stand within a few feet of one another, the streets wind with nowhere to leave a truck, and retaining walls do a great deal of the community's structural work. That combination decides who needs scan data here: architects designing additions on lots with no flat ground, structural engineers scoping foundation and retaining-wall replacements, owners who want a record of a property before a sale or an insurance question, and the county and special districts responsible for the roads, drainage, and utility structures perched on the same slopes.

The Trimble terrestrial laser scanner is the practical answer to Kensington access. We set up on stairs, decks, driveways, and the street itself, and each position returns millions of survey-grade points, so the house, the walls above and below it, the stairs, the driveway grade, and the neighboring structures are captured together without a rod person traversing a slope that steep. The eave and ridge heights of the houses next door are measured from the cloud rather than estimated, which matters when a design has to hold a setback or a view relationship on a lot only a few dozen feet wide. Vegetation is filtered in processing to yield true ground beneath the ivy and oaks. For county roadway walls, culverts, and slope repairs, we scan on an observed control network and can rescan later to compare epochs, the same high-accuracy method we use on larger structures.

Deliverables are the registered point cloud in E57 or RCP, DWG or DXF plans, sections, elevations and wall profiles, and Revit models at LOD 200 or 300. See our infrastructure scanning for control-tied structural work, Kensington as-built surveys for buildings, and Kensington topographic surveys for terrain.