SiteLens renders your site in an interactive 3D scene so you can see the building grid, control points, and surveyed points in context — over real terrain. The viewport is always present in the project workspace and updates live as you edit.
The scene
The viewer is a lightweight, interactive 3D scene drawn in a soft, matte "clay" style — bright in light mode, a deep neutral in dark mode. It shows:
- The terrain for your site.
- Nearby buildings, extruded for context.
- The building grid lines, with axis labels.
- Control points as red pins.
- All surveyed points as pins colored by category.
Drag to orbit, scroll to zoom, right-drag to pan. Zoom is clamped to a sensible range so you can't fly inside the ground or so far out that the site disappears.
When you select a point in the table, the camera glides to it; selecting a point in 3D opens its coordinate inspector.
Idle orbit
After about ten seconds without interaction the camera begins a slow, continuous orbit around the site — a gentle "attract" motion for dashboards and screens. Any interaction stops it immediately, and it resumes after you're idle again. It is disabled automatically if your system is set to reduce motion.
Terrain & buildings
Two context layers cover the area around your points and are cached with your project, so they load instantly and aren't re-fetched on every visit:
- Terrain — a real-world elevation grid for your site.
- Buildings — nearby building footprints, extruded to their height (or a sensible default), sitting on the terrain surface.
A single button (top-right) handles both:
- Click Load site data to fetch them the first time.
- Refresh site re-fetches them. To stay efficient, a refresh is limited to once every 7 days after the last fetch (the button shows why), plus a short cooldown to prevent accidental repeats. Whichever layer is still fresh is skipped, so only stale data is re-fetched.
The fetched area is derived automatically from your control and survey points, so there's nothing to configure. The terrain tile fades out at its edges so it blends seamlessly into the background rather than reading as a floating slab.
Terrain and buildings are a backdrop for context only — they are not survey-grade. The Z on your imported points is always the source of truth and is never replaced by terrain.
Project onto terrain
Survey data often comes in with a local or zero elevation. With Project onto
terrain enabled, any point whose elevation is exactly 0 is draped onto the
terrain surface so it sits on the ground instead of floating below it, and grid
lines follow the terrain contour. A point that carries a real Z always keeps it —
its own elevation takes precedence.
Turning Terrain off also turns projection off (you can re-enable it independently). The camera's pivot tracks the terrain height at the grid centre, so toggling projection smoothly re-aims the view.
Display options
The Display menu (top-left) toggles what's drawn:
- Point pins — show/hide the point markers.
- Grid lines — show/hide the building grid and its labels. Grid lines extend past their ends with a dashed lead-out so the labels stay clear of the pins.
- Terrain — show/hide the terrain mesh.
- Buildings — show/hide the extruded buildings (appears once buildings have been fetched).
- Project onto terrain — drape zero-elevation features onto the surface.
- DXF overlays — show/hide the architect's drawing (appears once an overlay is uploaded). DXF overlays render flat at their set elevation, not draped on terrain. Pick which layers to show in the Layers menu — none are shown by default. See DXF Overlay.
Camera views
The selector (bottom-right) jumps the camera to a preset — Top, Front, Back, Left, Right, or Isometric — with a smooth glide. The focus button beside it resets to the default isometric framing. Grabbing the camera mid-glide cancels the transition and hands control straight back to you.
Point categories
Every point has a category — Control/Reference, Station, Column, Corner, Spot/Elevation, Utility, or a custom one your org defines. Categories drive the marker color and icon in the scene.
Use the Categories menu (top-left) to show or hide categories, with a Select all / none shortcut to declutter quickly. Points can also carry free-text tags for ad-hoc grouping.
Finding points
The point sidebar lists every point and lets you search and filter by category, label, description, and tags. Selecting a point in the list flies the camera to it in 3D. Save a group to name a selection you return to often.
Next: DXF Overlay.