Surveying for Architects

Across New South Wales and Victoria, Landair Surveys enables architects to design with precision — by capturing intricate site features and building details using 3D laser scanning and reality capture. 

Surveying for Architects

How we capture your architecture and heritage project

Feature and level surveys

Measure all external objects and topography to create site plan architecture that includes 2D site drawings and 3D contours. These plans help meet local council guidelines and accurately reflect existing site conditions.

Underground services surveys

Trace underground services – such as electricity, water, gas and sewerage – and add the data to your existing conditions survey.

3D laser scanning

Use millimetre-precise architectural laser scanner technology to digitally capture facades, modern architecture floor plans, and internal structures. Ideal for custom home design, heritage conservation, and complex site analysis.

RPA flyover surveys

Capture whole-of-site imagery and surface models through aerial photography. This enhances floor plans, roof plans, and volume calculations — especially on large or inaccessible sites.

Title surveys

Calculate the position of your site’s title boundaries – and add existing easements to the survey plan.

Monitoring surveys

Continue measuring key locations on a building façade to track changes in movement and verticality over time. 

Your quality data outcomes

Floorplan

Floorplans and RCPs

Develop existing floor plans and reflected ceiling plans using interior scanning data. Our services help bring your modern architecture floor plans to life with millimetre accuracy.

Floor elevation plans

Façade elevation plans

Create elevation plans using external scanning survey data – that show architectural elements in detail. 

Werribee roof plan

Roof plans and imagery

Create high-resolution roof plans and imagery using reality capture techniques like RPA and 3D laser scanning. Useful for site planning, assessment reports, and volumetric studies.

Point cloud

3D models and point clouds

Generate detailed 3D models and point clouds from laser scanning data. Delivered in Revit, AutoCAD, or LOD formats to support accurate site design, building analysis, and planning submissions. 

Feature survey

Feature survey plans

Show existing building footprints, topography, and structures. These site plan architecture deliverables meet both design and compliance requirements across Victoria and New South Wales.

Section plan

Section plans and verticality analyses

Processing scanning and monitoring data to show facade verticality and room-to-room site context.

Reality capture

We equip architects with complete reality capture of the site using advanced 3D scanners - including the Faro Focus S150+ and NavVis VLX3. Get full floor plans, building footprints and point clouds in the formats your team needs (AutoCAD, Revit).

View and measure every possible data point, from every angle and reference, to: 

  • Minimise disruption on your project and on-site risk.
  • Save money and time by measuring all visible features the first time.
  • Design with confidence that you fully understand every detail.
  • Supports conservation, and compliance with local planning frameworks.
  • Capture in square metres, volumes, and real-world measurements for reliable design inputs.

Never experience a data shortfall again, with a solid foundation for planning, design, remediation or condition assessments.  

See successful projects with our partner architects.

We’ve worked with established architects across New South Wales and Victoria who value our clear communication and quality outcomes.  

Why architects choose Landair for surveying.

We know how important it is for architects to understand every detail – from modern floor plans to decorative elements – down to the millimetre.

Landair Surveys makes precision and compliance a priority, using 3D scanning and site plan architecture expertise to deliver data architects can trust.

Your challenges

  • Struggling to find surveyors who understand heritage overlays, conservation and architectural workflows?
  • Need a partner who supports projects in Melbourne, Sydney and regional areas?
  • Looking for surveyors who prioritise safe work, reliable data, and on-time delivery?

How we can help

  • Our team has decades of experience with architects and on heritage sites.
  • We’re known for capturing unmatched detail in areas like stone and brickwork.
  • Our commitment is to go above and beyond for our architect partners.
  • We’ve assisted with quoting and scoping projects, as well as grant applications.
  • Our surveyors know your process and have the appropriate public liability insurance.
  • We work fast to meet tight timeframes, especially around funding agreements.

Hear from our architect partners.

Meet our experts in surveying for architects.

When small measurement errors can lead to large design issues, architects across Melbourne and Sydney choose Landair Surveys for our specialist knowledge in 3D laser scanning, site plan architecture, and heritage data capture..

Ray

Director

Ray Cox

With over 20 years’ experience across all aspects of land and engineering surveying, Ray provides senior level supervision for Landair’s laser scanning, RPA (drone) and landfill surveying teams. 

Dave

Senior Surveyor

David Wilson

David is a well-seasoned senior surveyor and is the team leader for Landair’s 3D laser scanning projects. He has significant experience in major infrastructure and construction project management and enjoys mentoring junior surveyors keen on expanding their laser scanning and construction surveying skills. 

Matt Tuckwell

NSW Operations Manager

Matt Tuckwell

Matt is our Survey Operations Manager in New South Wales with more than a decade of experience as a senior surveyor including extensive experience with cadastral surveying and UAV inspection surveys. 

Brad

Project Surveyor

Brad Grandin

Brad has experience managing survey teams on complex architecture and heritage projects. He also specialises in 3D laser scanning, landfill surveying and RPA (drone) flyover surveys as a CASA-certified remote pilot. 

Matt Del

Project Surveyor

Matt Delahunty

Matt has been part of the Landair team for over 5 years and during that time he has gained a high level of experience across the company’s different surveying tasks specializing in construction, monitoring and laser scanning surveys. He is particularly skilled at completing large-scale feature surveys and enjoys training the junior survey assistants.

Morgan

Project Surveyor

Morgan Jones

 Since joining the Landair team in 2018 Morgan has gained significant experience across the company’s different surveying tasks specialising in landfill surveying and RPA (drone) mapping projects. He also specialises in construction surveys, large-scale feature surveys and is the primary surveyor at Landair for underground services detection surveys. 

Clare Capell

Senior Survey Drafter

Clare Capell

Clare joined the Landair Surveys team in 2016 with significant drafting experience across all land surveying disciplines. As our Senior Survey Drafter, Clare specialises in cadastral, feature, infrastructure and laser scanning survey drafting tasks and has experience in 3D modelling and pointcloud data extraction.

Who trusts us.

Lovell Chen
Conservation Studio
4Site Design Group
Silver Thomas Hanky Architects
Architectus
Mott MacDonald
Millar Archiects
Design Core
Clarke Hopkins Clarke
Purcell
RBA Architects
Baldasso Cortese
Watson Young
Neeson Murcutt
Turner & Townsend

FAQs

As a general rule-of-thumb, the following accuracies can be expected from the technologies Landair utilizes: 

  • Stationary (static) laser scanner: up to +/- 3-5mm 
  • Mobile laser scanner: up to +/- 10-15mm 
  • Survey total station: +/- 3mm 
  • Survey-grade GNSS (GPS): +/-20mm 
  • RPA (drone): Horizontal +/- 20-50mm; Vertical +/- 150mm (largely dependent on surface reflectiveness, object contrast and consistent topography) 
  • Survey-grade dumpy level: Vertical +/- 1mm 

Stationary, or static, scanners (Landair uses Faro Focus S150+ scanners) are set up on a tripod at each critical location and moved around the scene between scans. Sanning times at each location range between 2min and 10min depending on site constraints. Mobile scanners (Landair uses the wearable NavVis VLX3 scanner) run continuously as the surveyor walks through the scene capturing everything it sees on-the-fly.  

Stationary scanners are more accurate, but the trade-off is the time spent on site. Mobile scanners allow quick measurement of a scene, but the trade-off is a slightly lower accuracy compared to stationary scanners. There are also different pointcloud formats, densities and ranges between the two scanning types. Please consult Landair’s 3D Laser Scanning Options for more details.

It varies project to project. While both include the foundational elements of walls, windows, doors, ceilings, columns, stairs, fences, etc., LOD400 includes the finer details like ceiling objects, wall fixtures, electrical equipment, rigid ducting, etc. Please consult Landair’s LOD Options as a guide for what’s included / excluded for the different levels. 

Revit is predominantly a design platform. As such, it assumes straight walls, flat floors, consistent gradients, etc. Laser scanning, though, records buildings or infrastructure as-is – walls not perfectly square, floors not perfectly flat, etc. When a model is created in Revit from a pointcloud it is effectively dumbed-down to fit Revit’s design constraints. As such, a lowering of accuracy is inevitable. From experience, it’s not unusual to find differences of up to +/-20mm between objects in the 3D model and the corresponding points in the 3D pointcloud.  

Landair Surveys is covered by $20,000,000 Public Liability Insurance and $10,000,000 Professional Indemnity.

We do. Landair utilises the Cintoo web-hosting platform to create online viewers. Cintoo allows specified users to take virtual walkthroughs of the laser scanning data. You can view in image mode (like Google Streetview) or in 3D surface mode and take ad-hoc measurements as required. Viewer access can be password protected for added security.  

Most laser scanning quotes will include a nominal access period to Cintoo as a free value-add to our client. If useful, additional hosting time can be purchased based on the number of scans taken. 

How long is a piece of string? Most of our field work for architects is completed within a day but major projects can be spread over a week depending on the complexities involved. The largest scanning job Landair has completed to date had the fieldwork spread over four weeks due to site constraints.  

For smaller jobs, the required plans are usually completed within a few business days following the fieldwork. Larger projects have a data handover usually one to two weeks following fieldwork. Major projects and high-detailed modelling jobs will usually have final data handover two to four weeks following fieldwork. 

For colourised pointclouds, high-resolution imagery is taken at each scanning location and the relevant RGB value of each image pixel is assigned to the corresponding scan points. This is good for most scanning environments. However, very dark or glary environments will significantly affect camera exposure leading to washed out pointcloud colouring. In such instances it is better to scan in greyscale format. A pseudo black-and-white image is created from the laser scanner’s intensity values to allow better viewing of the pointcloud. 

Greyscale scanning is quicker than colour scanning due to the time spent for image capture at each scanning location. Most of Landair’s clients choose colour scanning for outdoor environments and greyscale scanning for internal environments to bring the overall scanning costs down.  

You can, but you need to be aware of the limitations. Most architects will choose 3D modelling to align to LOD300 or LOD400. There are objects included in LOD400 modelling that aren’t in LOD300. For example, most wall fixtures (vents, lights, electrical equipment, decorative elements, etc) are not included in LOD300 modelling. Any façade elevation plan extracted from a LOD300 model won’t include such elements when they would probably be useful to show on a plan. The same applies to floorplans and RCPs. 

If the preferred final deliverables are printed plans instead of electronic models, it is often better to draft façade plans, floorplans and RCPs directly from the pointcloud. That way, all desired elements are included. 

Multiple scans are often required to measure everything within a scanning survey extent. This will mean the same real-world location can be measured by three or more scans. Even with a highly-accurate scanning control network and lots of overlapping linking targets, miniscule scanner and positional errors can lead to a spread of points for each real-world position. Usually, this point spread is within +/-3mm. However, black or highly reflective objects, shallow angle measurement and long scanning distances can affect recorded laser pulse values. This inevitably leads to increased ‘noise’ in the pointcloud.  

When we create plans and models from the pointcloud we ignore the outliers and filter through the ‘noise’ to make sure what we provide represents what’s on site. 

Plan and design with confidence

Discover how Landair Surveys can elevate your architecture and heritage projects with precision-driven solutions.

Architects
Brighton Feature Survey
Architects
Architects
Architects
Architects Revit
Architects
Architects
Architects

Major Building (LOD 400)

Cite Office (LOD 300)

Building Section (LOD 400)

Heritage Dome Pointcloud

Exisiting conditions Pointcloud

Let’s get started.