3D Scanning in San Rafael, CA

San Rafael carries more infrastructure per square mile than anywhere else in Marin. The Richmond-San Rafael Bridge lands at Point San Quentin on the city's eastern edge and feeds the Interstate 580 and Highway 101 interchange; SMART's passenger rail runs through downtown on its way south to Larkspur; and the low ground of the Canal district and the downtown flats sits close enough to bay level that flood and sea-level-rise planning is a standing item on every capital project. Scanning that kind of asset is a different discipline from documenting a building. We establish a survey control network on published horizontal and vertical control, register every scan to it, and deliver clearance envelopes, structural as-builts of decks, girders, bents, abutments, and retaining structures, and baseline epochs that a later scan can be differenced against to measure movement.

The building work is just as steady, because San Rafael is Marin's commercial and civic center. Fourth Street and the surrounding blocks hold older masonry and concrete commercial buildings moving through seismic retrofit, tenant repositioning, and mixed-use conversion, and none of them have drawings that match what is standing. Marin County's Civic Center, a Frank Lloyd Wright building and a National Historic Landmark, is the most visible reminder that the county's architecture rewards careful measurement; curved, sculptural, and irregular buildings are precisely the case where hand measurement fails and a point cloud does not. Hospitals, schools, and county facilities scan for the same reason: modernization design needs the building as built, not as drawn.

We deliver registered point clouds in E57 or RCP, scan-to-CAD floor plans, sections, and elevations in DWG/DXF, and Revit models at an agreed level of detail. Records of Survey and Corner Records arising from the control work are filed through the Marin County Surveyor. See infrastructure scanning, deformation monitoring, and our San Rafael as-built surveys.