Survey Studio
Point clouds, terrain surfaces and volumes, processed in your browser.
Bring a point cloud or surface you already have, check what it contains, and work out cut and fill, sections and bench volumes with the method stated next to every number. The maths is tested against known answers on synthetic surfaces; it has not been validated against a real field survey yet.
What it does today
Import survey data
LAS 1.0-1.4 point clouds, PLY and OBJ meshes, LandXML TIN surfaces, ASCII DXF, GeoJSON and CSV/TXT points with an explicit column and unit mapping. Anything a file contains that is not converted is listed, never silently dropped.
View it in 3D
A point-cloud and surface viewer with level-of-detail loading, elevation and class colouring, plan view and point picking that reports the original float64 coordinates.
Exact cut and fill
Volumes between two surfaces, a flat level or a best-fit plane, inside an optional boundary, integrated exactly over the triangles rather than sampled on a grid. Deadband and density are named settings, shown in the result.
Sections, benches, storage
Profiles along a line with display-only exaggeration, fill and cut per bench or flitch, and water storage at a level with a storage curve.
Export and report
CSV, LAS, LandXML, OBJ, DXF and float32 GeoTIFF DEM, each previewed before download with what the format cannot carry, plus a PDF quantity report.
Keep your project
Autosave in this browser, and a portable .zsurvey backup with or without your original files. Every stored object is checked by SHA-256 when it is opened.
Not yet, and said plainly
- Reconstruction from drone photos (Photos tab) is experimental. It is tested only on a synthetic scene, one camera per run, and is slow on large sets.
- LAZ and COPC files are decoded whole, in the browser (experimental). Large files are slow and COPC level-of-detail streaming is not used.
- Datum and geoid transformations are not applied, and layers are never re-projected. Coordinates stay in the grid they arrive in; MGA/UTM scale factors are shown for display only.
- No accuracy figure is claimed. Results are only as good as your data, and checkpoints are needed to assess absolute accuracy.
Where your data goes
Files you open are read by this page in your browser and saved, if you choose, in this browser's storage or a .zsurvey file you download. They are not sent to a Zerdly server. The page itself, like any web page, is downloaded from Zerdly, and the site's page analytics run here as on every Zerdly page.
Those analytics count page views and nothing else: no cookie, no reading of your projects, no coordinates, file names or measurements, and no other third party. The workspace sends no request carrying anything from your data, and e2e/survey-studio-privacy.prod.spec.ts records every request a full session makes and fails if that stops being true. You can opt out of the counting entirely on the privacy page.
What you need
A current desktop browser with WebGL 2 for the 3D view. Phones can open projects and run quantities, with a smaller view. Large clouds are limited by your device's memory; the workspace shows how many points it is displaying.
Readiness: Experimental - synthetic-validated survey maths; reconstruction is research status. See the format guide and the help page.