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Samples / Case Study
No Alarm Farm — Cumberland Plateau, TN

A plan on paper.
A clearer picture of the place.

At our family farm on the Cumberland Plateau, the owner had a master plan built on an existing survey. What he wanted to understand next was how the buildings on that plan related to the buildings actually there.

Real capture · textured 3D mesh Explore live in 3D →
01 · The owner’s question

How closely does the plan match the place?

A boundary survey and an owner’s building plan answer different questions. The owner had added buildings and utilities to an existing survey sheet, but was unsure how closely those drawn building positions matched the property.

We used aerial imagery to identify visible roof outlines and prepared an annotated comparison. The useful result was a shared picture: the owner could see where the plan and the capture differed and which questions deserved a closer look.

02 · The visual comparison

Make the differences easy to see.

Isolated plan and aerial roof outlines for the storage shed, poolhouse and bunkhouse

Dashed: owner’s plan. Orange: aerial roof outline.

Storage shed: owner plan in dashed lines and aerial roof outline in orangePoolhouse: owner plan in dashed lines and aerial roof outline in orangeBunkhouse: owner plan in dashed lines and aerial roof outline in orange
Dashed outlines come from the owner’s drawing. Orange outlines come from aerial roof geometry, shown using the existing approximate alignment. Each close-up has its own scale. Boundaries, utilities and private details are omitted.

The comparison made differences in the planned placements visible. It also made the limits visible: a roof edge is not a wall face, the corner monuments were not observed, and the overlay was aligned approximately rather than established on survey control.

This family exercise demonstrates visual interpretation. It does not establish property boundaries, setbacks, an encroachment or a permitted location for a new building. Measured overlays and distance tools require separate scope review before commercial delivery.

The original sheet was a preliminary 2018 survey copy. The imagery for the building comparison was captured on July 23, 2026, and the annotations were prepared on September 11. The 3D examples below come from earlier July work; they are separate captures.

03 · Explore the capture

Different views of the same property.

The July 10 mapping capture produced the aerial overview, point cloud and textured model below. A separate orbit supplied the poolhouse’s photoreal model. These are demonstration views, not certified measurement products.

Orthomosaic of the No Alarm Farm property — a true-color, top-down aerial map
01 / Raster

Orthomosaic

A stitched aerial image that helps you see the property as a whole. The pixel size describes image detail, not verified positional accuracy.

0.99 cm/px · GeoTIFF · UTM 16N
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Point cloud of the property — 29.5 million 3D points captured by drone
02 / Geometry

Point cloud

A point-based reconstruction of visible surfaces. It is shown here as a technical demonstration; gaps and artifacts remain where the capture could not resolve detail.

29.5M pts · LAS → 3D Tiles
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Textured 3D mesh of the property — a solid, walkable surface model
03 / Surface

Textured 3D mesh

A solid, walkable model of the property — the spinning reconstruction at the top of this page.

OBJ / FBX · triangulated
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Photoreal Gaussian-splat reconstruction of the pool house — near-photographic detail
04 / Immersive

Photoreal splat

A near-photographic Gaussian-splat reconstruction of the pool house — from a separate, purpose-flown orbit (see below).

254,785 primitives · web viewer
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04 — What it taught us

You can't fix capture geometry in post.

Then we pushed it. We took that same nadir mapping data and asked the pipeline for a photorealistic 3D model of the property. The buildings came out convincingly — the pool, the deck, the lawn furniture, all recognizable. But every patch of grass rendered as a field of needles, and the ground at the capture's edge bowed upward like the rim of a bowl.

Our first instinct was cleanup: filter the stray blobs, cut the low-confidence geometry. It helped at the margins and then hit a hard ceiling — because the spikes and the bowl were the geometry, baked in at capture. A camera that only ever looked straight down has never seen the side of anything, and no amount of processing can supply information the flight didn't collect.

CAMERA ↓ NADIR
Nadir — straight down
Parallel lines, camera pointed at the ground. Sees tops of everything, sides of nothing.
→ Overhead imagery for visual overviews. → Photoreal 3D collapses into a field of needles.
CAMERA → ORBIT
Oblique — orbit, looking in
Rings at different heights, camera aimed at the subject. Sees walls, eaves, corners, undersides.
→ 317 frames flown, 307 locked to one solution. → Near-photographic splat of the pool house.

So we flew the control group. That same week we ran a manual double orbit around the farm's pool house — two rings at different heights and radii, camera looking in. Oblique geometry: the flight sees walls, eaves, corners, the undersides of things. From 317 frames, 307 locked into a single clean solution, and the splat that came out renders near-photographic. Same aircraft. Same camera. Same processing pipeline. The capture geometry made the difference.

Every deliverable has a capture geometry it wants — and the two families don't substitute for each other. The one thing we can't do is fix capture geometry in post.

— The lesson that now shapes every Atlas quote
05 · What this means for your place

Start with the question you want to answer.

A Property Overview helps you discuss a place. Atlas Worlds lets someone explore it remotely. A Site Record shows its visible condition at a particular time. Each starts with the views and context that will be useful to you.

If your decision involves building placement, boundaries, design, permits or quantities, say so at the start. Those uses need a separate scope review and the appropriate professional involvement.

Your site, in this detail.

This family demonstration shows the value of a clear visual explanation. Tell us about your property and the question you want to answer, and we will discuss the right scope.

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