Your survey data, live in the browser: introducing the 3DroneMapping delivery portal

For years the last step of every survey we flew was the same: zip the deliverables, push them through a file-transfer service, and hope the link didn't expire before the client's IT department let the download through. The data was good. The handover wasn't.

That changes now. Every 3DroneMapping project is delivered through our own portal at delivery.3dronemapping.com — a private page per project where you can look at the survey, measure it, cut cross-sections through it and pull off contours, all in a normal web browser, before you download a single gigabyte.

To show it off we've published a public sample project, sp-01, flown in August 2026 over 715 ha of Karoo farmland in South Africa with a DJI Zenmuse L3 on a Matrice 400: 255 points/m², a 5 cm orthomosaic, ground/non-ground classification, 30 mm vertical accuracy on hard surfaces, delivered in UTM 34S on SAGEOID2010 orthometric heights — 14.41 GB in total. Open it and click around while you read: delivery.3dronemapping.com/sp-01

What you get on every project page

Each delivery opens on a single project page that states exactly what was flown and what you're receiving: sensor, survey date, orthomosaic GSD, point density, coordinate system, vertical datum and the achieved accuracy on hard surfaces. No more digging through a PDF report to find out whether the heights are ellipsoidal or orthometric — it's on the page, above the download buttons. On the sample project that reads UTM 34S, SAGEOID2010 orthometric, 255 pts/m², 30 mm vertical on hard surfaces.

From there you have two viewers and one download panel.

2D plan view: the orthomosaic with contours and measurement

The plan viewer streams the full-resolution orthomosaic as map tiles over satellite or street basemaps, so you can zoom from the whole site down to individual fence posts without waiting for a multi-gigabyte GeoTIFF to load.

Contours are a toggleable layer, the ortho has an opacity slider for comparing against the basemap, and the status bar reads out live grid coordinates in the project's projection alongside WGS84 latitude/longitude as you move the mouse. Distance and area tools let you check a boundary length or a field's hectares on the spot.

3D point cloud: the full LiDAR dataset, streamed

The 3D viewer loads the complete classified LiDAR point cloud — all 715 ha at 255 pts/m², not a decimated preview — and streams it progressively so it's usable within seconds even on an ordinary laptop.

Colour the cloud by RGB, elevation, classification or intensity with a single click. Elevation colouring makes drainage lines and terraces jump out immediately; classification colouring shows exactly which returns have been classed as ground.

The measurement tools cover distance, area, height difference and single-point inspection — clicking any point reports its coordinates, elevation, intensity, return number, classification and scan angle.

Cross-sections and profiles you can take away

This is the tool we think engineers will use most. Draw a line across the terrain, set a corridor width, and a height profile updates live below the viewer. That profile can be exported directly as DXF (2D or 3D), CSV or LAS, so a road or pipeline section goes straight from the browser into CAD without opening the full cloud in specialist software.

Then download the real thing

The viewers are for inspection. The deliverables themselves — the LAS/LAZ point cloud, the GeoTIFF orthomosaic and the contour files — sit in the download panel at the bottom of the page in their original formats and projections, ready to drop into Civil 3D, Global Mapper, QGIS, Trimble Business Center or whatever you work in. Large files are served as direct high-speed downloads, and access is password-protected per client with an expiry you control.

Why we built it ourselves

We looked at the commercial point-cloud hosting platforms and they all had the same problems: per-project fees that we'd have to pass on to you, viewers that show a thinned-out sample rather than the survey you paid for, and data sitting on someone else's servers. The portal runs on our own infrastructure, costs nothing extra per project, and streams the full dataset. It also means that when you ask for a change — a new export format, a different basemap, volume tools — we can build it rather than wait on a vendor.

Try it

Open the sample project, switch the cloud to elevation colouring, and draw a profile across the riverbed.

Open the sample project

If you've got a site that needs surveying — LiDAR, photogrammetry or both, anywhere in Africa — get in touch and your deliverables will arrive this way.