10.9 Project Estimating
Field time, battery count, storage, and processing time for every project type. Use these to build proposals, schedule field days, and confirm your hardware is sized for the job before you leave the office.
What These Numbers Are
This page mixes two kinds of figure and they carry different weight. Device limits, fusion caps and hardware requirements are published by XGRIDS and are stated as facts. Coverage rates, setup allowances and processing ratios are Alpine field estimates, and every one of them is labelled where it appears.
XGRIDS publishes no floor-area-to-time figure for any device. Use the estimates here to build a proposal and to check that an access window is realistic. Do not quote them to a client as a guaranteed rate, and replace them with your own capture logs as those accumulate.
The Numbers You Need Before Every Job
L2 Pro
- Battery runtime: 90 minutes per battery. Roughly 20 percent less below 41°F (5°C). Alpine estimate for the cold-weather figure.
- Internal storage: 1 TB SSD, not swappable. Approximately 12 to 16 hours of raw scan data at an estimated 60 to 80 GB per hour.
- Project scale: Campus-scale environments, and the only device with backpack, vehicle and drone mounts.
- Walking pace: 3.3 ft/s (1 m/s) in open feature-rich areas, 1.6 ft/s (0.5 m/s) indoors and in dim light, at doorways and around corners.
- Initialization: 15-second static countdown confirmed by the app, then at least 10 seconds more after the point cloud appears before lifting the device. Two separate waits.
- RTK setup: 5 to 10 minutes per session including module attach, satellite acquisition and the post-Fix walk-in. Alpine estimate.
- Control point interval: 328 ft (100 m) maximum.
K2
- Battery runtime: 90 minutes per battery. Roughly 20 percent less in cold conditions. Alpine estimate for the cold-weather figure.
- Internal storage: 512 GB, not field-swappable. Approximately 6 to 8 hours of raw scan data.
- Project scale: Single-building to small-campus indoor and outdoor coverage. Handheld only.
- Walking pace: Same as the L2 Pro. 3.3 ft/s (1 m/s) open, 1.6 ft/s (0.5 m/s) indoors and in dim light, at doorways and around corners.
- Initialization: Same two-stage sequence as the L2 Pro.
- RTK setup: 3 to 5 minutes per session. RTK is built in, so the time is satellite acquisition and the post-Fix walk-in only. Alpine estimate.
- Control point interval: 164 ft (50 m) maximum.
- Add 3 minutes of continuous movement to any scan that needs colour. The L2 Pro needs 2.
PortalCam
- Battery runtime: 60 minutes per battery. Plan the changeover above 20 percent rather than at the warning.
- Internal storage: 512 GB. Sufficient for most single-day projects.
- Project scale: Small to medium indoor environments, optimized for visual fidelity rather than area coverage. Produces 3DGS only and no georeferenced output, so it cannot serve a job with an absolute-accuracy requirement.
- Walking pace: 1.6 ft/s (0.5 m/s) as the ceiling anywhere, 1.0 ft/s (0.3 m/s) indoors, in dim light, at doorways and around corners. Roughly half the pace of the other two devices in every condition.
- Initialization: approximately 25 seconds of startup, then about 6 seconds after pressing record before scanning begins, then wait for the slow green flash before lifting.
- Add 2 to 3 seconds at every door frame for the transition.
A PortalCam job estimated from an L2 Pro rate is under-budgeted by about half. The pace difference applies to every condition, not just the difficult ones. Size the access window from the PortalCam column or expect to run out of it.
Fusion Limits and Prerequisites
A project too large for one capture becomes a fusion project, and the two applications impose different limits. Plan segments against the one you will actually process in. Where the project needs both point cloud and 3DGS from the same captures, plan to the stricter figure in every row.
Two prerequisites decide the field day, not the office day. LixelStudio needs at least three non-collinear absolute control points across the whole project, which is easy to satisfy inside each session and still fail across the set. LCC Studio rejects any input scan that carries neither control points nor RTK, and field control cannot be added after capture. Both have to be planned before anyone leaves.
The K2 supports all three LCC Studio reconstruction types: Single Model, Map Fusion, and Aerial-Ground Map Fusion. Single-scene reconstruction is capped at 90 minutes.
Estimating Scan Time in the Field
XGRIDS devices do not capture a fixed area per unit of time the way a terrestrial scanner does. Coverage depends on walking pace, space complexity, and how much re-coverage the deliverable needs. The rates below are Alpine field estimates at the indoor pace, single-pass coverage, and no significant environmental challenges.
These rates match 3.6 Scan Plan Tool, which is where the full planning template lives. Halve them for a PortalCam job.
Adjustment Factors
- Multiply by 2.5 to 3.0 for three-pass coverage. The published three-pass method walks the same routes three times, so the cost is close to arithmetic. Apply it wherever the deliverable needs ceiling and floor detail or high 3DGS quality.
- Multiply by 1.5 to 2.0 where there are many transitions: multi-floor, many small rooms, stairwell-heavy layouts.
- Multiply by 1.5 to 2.0 for any site you cannot clear before scanning. Occupied offices and active construction need repeated passes and longer dwell at transitions.
- Add 30 to 60 minutes per session for setup, startup-point selection, RTK Fix and final checks.
- Add target time: 3 to 5 minutes per anchor target, 10 to 15 minutes per surveyed control point.
- Add escort coordination at secure sites: 15 to 30 minutes per access window.
- Add a 25 percent buffer to whatever the total comes to.
Segment boundaries are planned, never discovered. No device can pause a scan or resume from a breakpoint, so a boundary you hit by accident almost never has the overlap that fusion needs. Alpine plans 12 to 15 minutes per capture, which sits under every software and memory limit and leaves room for coverage you did not anticipate.
Battery and Storage Planning
Budget one spare battery per 90 minutes of planned field time on the L2 Pro and K2, and per 60 minutes on the PortalCam. Add one extra for projects over 3 hours or in temperatures below 41°F (5°C), where runtime drops by an estimated 20 percent. Keep spares warm in an interior pocket until use.
Budget an estimated 60 to 80 GB per hour of scanning for the L2 Pro and K2. For multi-day projects, plan offload drives with at least 1 TB free per full scan day.
Processing workspace is temporary but has to exist while processing runs. LixelStudio needs at least 5 times the raw project folder size on an SSD for standard processing. Point cloud enhancement is far heavier: 25 times the original map file at 5 mm, and 465 times at 1 mm. LCC Studio needs at least 120 GB available, 240 GB on SSD for the recommended configuration. Project data must sit on a local internal disk; external drives, USB sticks and network paths are a documented cause of post-processing crashes.
Estimating Processing Time
Memory, not the battery and not the software ceiling, is what limits a single reconstruction on a real workstation.
64 GB is the published minimum for both applications, and both require an NVIDIA GPU. Full hardware requirements are in 10.7 Device Specifications.
Reconstruction time scales with capture length at an estimated 20 minutes of processing per minute of capture, at medium quality on recommended hardware. Higher quality settings increase it substantially and XGRIDS publishes no consistent ratio for them. Test one segment at your target quality before committing a full project to an overnight run.
Every figure in the table above is an Alpine estimate. None is published by XGRIDS.
Do not plan on running both applications at once. Treat a workstation as processing one job at a time when you build a delivery schedule. A failed overnight reconstruction costs a day and cannot be partially recovered, so the calendar time a parallel run might save is not worth the exposure.
Total Time from Site Visit to Delivered Output
The most common quoting mistake is pricing delivery from scan duration alone and ignoring processing, QC and export. Build the timeline from all four phases.
- Pre-field preparation. Software verified and activated, batteries charged, storage cleared, lenses cleaned, coordinate strategy confirmed, control placed and surveyed if required, and every locked capture setting decided. Plan 1 to 3 hours depending on complexity.
- Field collection. Setup, initialization, scanning, in-field review before leaving site, and data transfer off the device. Use the scan time estimates above.
- Processing. Reconstruction in LixelStudio, LCC Studio, or both in sequence. Plan overnight for anything over 20 minutes of capture.
- QC and export. Review the output, check the accuracy report and control residuals, clean noise, export to client format. Plan 1 to 4 hours.
The cheapest phase to protect is the second one. An in-field review before leaving site costs 10 to 15 minutes. A return visit costs a day, plus travel, plus whatever the client thinks about being asked back.
Worked Example: 12,900 sq ft (1,200 sq m) Office Floor
Single-floor office space, point cloud and 3DGS deliverables, scanned with an L2 Pro or K2. Client deliverable is an RCP for Revit plus an LCC model for visualization.
Why three captures rather than one. A single 45-minute walk of this floor would exceed the LixelStudio fusion limit, sit at the edge of what 64 GB reconstructs reliably, and leave no recovery path if anything went wrong partway through, because no device can resume from a breakpoint. Three planned captures with real overlap cost nothing extra in the field and remove all three risks.
For project-specific scoping questions, contact Alpine Reality Capture.
©2026 Alpine Reality Capture LLC • XGRIDS Pro Guide™ • Site Disclaimer