Buying Guide

LCC Studio

Lixel CyberColor turns scan data into photorealistic 3D environments anyone can walk through in a browser. Basic is included with every scanner purchase. Premium adds multi-segment work and open export formats.

Basic Included With Every Scanner 3D Gaussian Splatting One-Click Web Publishing Works With All Four Scanners

Overview

What LCC Studio Is For

LCC Studio processes raw scan data into 3D Gaussian Splat models. The output is a photorealistic, navigable environment that a client can explore in a web browser without installing anything. It is the visual counterpart to LixelStudio, which produces measured point clouds from the same captures.

All four current scanners feed it: the L3, L2 Pro, K2, and PortalCam. The L3, L2 Pro, and K2 send the same raw capture to both applications, so one site visit produces both a measurement deliverable and a walkthrough. The PortalCam works with LCC Studio only.

What LCC Studio is not is a measurement tool. The Gaussian ellipsoids represent appearance rather than precise surface positions, and the built-in measurement readout is approximate. Anything a client will build or bill against belongs in a point cloud.

Licensing

Basic and Premium

One installer, two tiers. Basic is included with every scanner purchase and is activated with a registered XGRIDS account. Premium is sold as an annual subscription or as a perpetual license, paid once. The PortalCam Advanced package includes the first year of the annual subscription.

Basic

Included with every scanner purchase

A complete single-session workflow, from reconstruction through to a shared web link.

Single Model reconstruction
Full viewer: first-person, Avatar, Collision, Portal
Clip, crop, and annotate
Asset overlay for .fbx, .glb, and .obj
One-click web publishing with cloud access management
Camera path recording and flythrough video export
Export to LCC and LCC2

Premium

Annual subscription or perpetual license

Everything in Basic, plus the multi-segment and aerial capabilities and the open export formats.

Map Fusion, for combining multiple scan segments
Aerial-Ground Map Fusion, for merging drone imagery with ground scans
Aerial Reconstruction
HD Enhancement, for supplementary photo detail
Spatial Recognition, for floor plan extraction
Export to PLY, USD, and 3D Tiles

There is no dataset size limit tied to the tier. Basic is not capped at a smaller scan or a simpler project. Premium is required for two reasons only: when a capture spans more than one session, because Map Fusion is the only way to combine segments, and when the deliverable has to leave the XGRIDS ecosystem as a PLY, USD, or 3D Tiles file. A single-session capture delivered as a web link or an LCC2 file needs no subscription.

What each Premium feature actually does

Feature

What it does and when you need it

Map Fusion

Combines up to 10 scan segments, 200 minutes total, into one continuous model. There is no per-segment time limit; segment length is governed by the device capture ceiling and by your workstation memory, not by the software. Required whenever a site outlasts a single battery or a single session. Supported on the L3, L2 Pro, K2, and PortalCam.

Aerial-Ground Map Fusion

Merges drone imagery with a ground scan into one model covering roof level and interior. Requires ground scan data, drone imagery, and photos at each takeoff and landing point together; reconstruction cannot start if any one is missing. Supported on the L3, L2 Pro, K2, and PortalCam.

Aerial Reconstruction

Builds a model from drone imagery alone, without a ground scan component.

HD Enhancement

Applies supplementary close-up photos to specific areas for higher visual detail than the scan alone produces. Supported for L3, L2 Pro, K2, and PortalCam data.

Spatial Recognition

Extracts structured floor plans and indoor geometry, and is the prerequisite for the 3D Layout tools and the LCC for Revit one-click modeling workflow. Single Model projects only, and a Map Fusion project cannot use it. Enabled at reconstruction time only, so it cannot be added to a finished model. Requires more than 8 GB of GPU memory. Available for L3, L2 Pro, and PortalCam data.

PLY, USD, and 3D Tiles export

The open formats. PLY for broad third-party compatibility, USD for NVIDIA Omniverse and Isaac Sim, 3D Tiles for Cesium and WebGIS digital twins. Basic exports LCC and LCC2 only, which stay inside the XGRIDS ecosystem.

Workflow

From Capture to Delivered Link

The sequence is the same on every device. What changes is which reconstruction type you pick at the start.

Step

What happens

1. Create the project

Choose Single Model, Map Fusion, or Aerial-Ground Map Fusion. The choice is fixed for that project; a completed model cannot be converted to another type later.

2. Import the capture

Connect the scanner by USB or point LCC Studio at the capture folder. Import the top-level project folder and keep the path free of spaces. Network storage is not supported as an upload source; copy to a local drive first.

3. Check the memory estimate

LCC Studio predicts the memory the job will need and displays it before you commit. A red Estimated Memory reading means the job is too large for that machine, and that is the moment to act rather than hours into the run.

4. Preview the point cloud

Point Cloud Preview shows the trajectory and a rough cloud, flagging coverage problems while they are still cheap to find.

5. Set parameters and run

Reconstruction Quality, Maximum Gaussian Points, Portability, and Coordinate System Conversion all lock at reconstruction. Leave LCC Studio open for the duration and avoid other GPU-heavy work on the same machine.

6. Edit and deliver

Scene Editor for viewpoints, tours, and publishing. Model Editor for cropping and color grading. Publish a web link, or export to a file format.

Exports

Choosing an Export Format

Ask the client what software they use before you scan, because a few of these carry a minimum host application version and will not load in an older release.

Format

Use it for

Tier

LCC2

The default delivery format. Smallest files, fastest loading, highest quality per megabyte. SOG and SPZ compression variants.

Basic

LCC

Previous-generation format. Required by the LCC for Revit plugin, which accepts .lcc only.

Basic

Web link

One-click publishing with access management. No file for the client to handle at all.

Basic

PLY

Broadest third-party compatibility. Unreal Engine and Unity via community plugins.

Premium

USD

NVIDIA Omniverse and Isaac Sim. Simulation and robotics training pipelines.

Premium

3D Tiles

Cesium and WebGIS digital twins. Requires absolute coordinates and a model under roughly 4 million Gaussian points.

Premium

The LCC export is a multi-file folder, not a single self-contained file. Moving the .lcc pointer without its companion files produces a key file missing error at the far end. Send the whole folder.

System Requirements

What Your Workstation Needs

LCC Studio is Windows only and requires an NVIDIA GPU. It does not run on macOS, Linux, Windows Server, or a virtual machine.

Component

Requirement

Windows 10 or Windows 11

CPU

Intel i7 10700K or AMD Ryzen 7 3700X, 8-core desktop, minimum. AMD Ryzen 9 7950X, 16-core, recommended.16-core is the floor for Map Fusion and Aerial-Ground work. AMD processors are fully supported; the restriction is on graphics cards only.

GPU

RTX 3060 12 GB or Quadro RTX A4000 16 GB minimum. RTX 4090 24 GB, RTX 6000 Ada, or Tesla L40 recommended. RTX 3090 minimum for Map Fusion.NVIDIA only; AMD and Intel graphics are not supported and there is no workaround. The card must be RTX 20 series or above with CUDA 11.6 or above, running driver version 580 or above; older 10-series cards are to be avoided regardless of memory. Multi-GPU parallel processing is not supported and the software selects one card automatically, so a second GPU adds nothing. HD Enhancement and Spatial Recognition both require more than 8 GB of VRAM to run at all.

RAM

64 GB DDR5 minimum. 128 GB for large datasets or Map Fusion projects at 150 minutes or more of combined duration.Memory is the constraint that decides how long a single scan can be. See below.

Storage

120 GB free minimum, 240 GB on SSD recommended.Keep the project path and the capture backup path on an SSD separate from the install directory. Process from a local internal disk; external drives, USB flash drives, and network paths are a documented cause of post-processing crashes.

Memory and Scan Length

Reconstruction memory climbs with capture duration at roughly 2 GB per minute. 64 GB handles about 30 minutes of capture data reliably, with a real risk of failure past 45. 128 GB handles about 60 minutes reliably, with risk past 90.

LCC Studio imposes no time limit of its own: no timer, no duration-based rejection, so the software will accept a scan larger than the machine can finish. A red Estimated Memory reading at step 3 of the workflow is the moment to split the capture, drop Reconstruction Quality to Standard, or add memory. Commit past it and the run exhausts system memory and fails, with nothing recoverable.

Separately, the L2 Pro, K2, and PortalCam each stop recording at their own firmware ceiling: 90 minutes on the L2 Pro and K2, 60 minutes on the PortalCam. Those are hard limits that more memory does not move, and they are unrelated to the battery figures that happen to share their numbers.

XGRIDS recommends against capturing a full-length dataset in one session on any hardware. A single fault inside a long capture, whether SLAM drift, environmental interference, or a battery problem, makes the whole dataset difficult to recover and may force a complete rescan. Reconstruction also runs at roughly 20 minutes of processing per minute of capture, so a 45-minute scene is most of a day of compute before you learn whether it worked. Alpine plans production work at 12 to 15 minutes per segment and stitches with Map Fusion.

XGRIDS publishes no laptop-specific configuration, and the guidance is to use a desktop for large datasets because laptops thermal-throttle under sustained load and can crash mid-reconstruction. A laptop meeting the minimum figures above will process short scans.