3D Scanning in San Francisco, CA

Scanning work in San Francisco arrives from three directions at once. Design teams working on the city's dense pre-war housing and its early concrete and steel commercial buildings need geometry a tape cannot produce on a structure that has racked, settled, and been remodeled for a century. Owners and property managers downtown and in SoMa want floor plates, core dimensions, structural bay spacing, and above-ceiling conditions measured before they commit to a repositioning or a lab or office fit-out. And agencies, utilities, and their contractors working in the right-of-way need survey-grade coordinates on things that have to fit within hundredths of a foot rather than inches.

That third category is where scanning stops being a convenience. The Bay Bridge west approach and the elevated I-80 structure thread directly over SoMa streets, BART and Muni Metro run in tunnel beneath Market Street, the Port's finger piers along the Embarcadero stand on aging substructure, and the city's water and wastewater facilities are full of confined, congested spaces where a rod and prism are slow and often unsafe. For that work we scan from a control network rather than relying on cloud-to-cloud registration alone: targets tied to city monument lines and published benchmarks, on CCSF-CS13 horizontally and CCSF-VD13 vertically, which is a realization of NAVD88 rather than an offset from it. Control is what lets a clearance survey be checked against a design surface, or one scan epoch against another taken two years later. Street work carries a local rule as well: Public Works Order 187592 requires a Corner Record or Record of Survey before construction within 20 feet of a survey monument, and we file it.

Deliverables are the registered point cloud in E57 or RCP, scan-to-CAD DWG and DXF plans, sections and elevations, Revit models at the level of development the project needs, and, on horizontal work, surfaces, clearance diagrams, and structural as-builts. For bridges, tunnels, rail, and plants see our infrastructure scanning; for buildings, our San Francisco as-built surveys; for ground and grade, our San Francisco topographic surveys. Repeat epochs feed our deformation monitoring.