Points in, walls out
Today scan to BIM is a tracing job. A surveyor's laser scan reaches the architect as a few hundred million points, and a drafter spends days drawing walls out of it by hand before anyone can dimension an existing-conditions drawing or price a renovation; every traced wall is a place for the as-built to drift from the building.
Reconstruction Engine takes the surveyor's scan and hands the architect geometry: an IFC with the walls detected, or an OBJ mesh that can be measured, with the unit confirmed before any number trusts it. The architect checks a model instead of drawing one.
The surveyor's file, as exported
The architect uploads what the surveyor sent, in the format the scanner exports, E57 included; a survey scan is routinely a gigabyte, so the upload is built for it, and one that dies with the browser says so instead of sitting half-alive. Each model shows where it is, from upload to ready, with a thumbnail rendered from the cloud, or the reason when it failed.
The scale is confirmed before anything trusts it
Scanners export in millimeters or meters or feet, occasionally in whatever a previous tool rescaled to, and the E57 header does not reliably say which. Before anything downstream reads a number, the engine shows the model's height and asks the architect to confirm the unit, snapping to powers of ten: a two-storey clinic that reads 7,200 m tall becomes 7.2 m one step down. Confirmed once, every wall length and every area pulled from the model later uses the right unit.
IFC for the model, OBJ for the measurement
The architect picks the output: IFC for the building model with detected walls, OBJ for measurable mesh geometry. Reconstruction starts the moment processing finishes, and a conversion that cannot finish says which thing to change in plain words. The one seen most is "No walls detected", which is what a facade, a site survey or an outdoor scan looks like to a wall detector; those convert to OBJ instead, so the scan still leaves with geometry.
From the model to a price
The viewer remembers each architect's camera per project, and dimensions come off the geometry, which is the difference between "about 4.2 m" and 4.18 m on an existing-conditions drawing. A downloaded IFC can go straight into Material Engine's pricing, which reads the elements, derives purchasable rows, matches them against the catalog and snapshots the unit price at the time of the run, so a later catalog change cannot quietly rewrite an estimate the architect already read.