Kit matters less than the four settings you lock
Agencies ask what to buy first. The honest answer is that a current phone in a gimbal, used properly, beats a cinema camera used badly — and the difference between a good and bad capture is four things you set before you start walking.
- Exposure, locked. Auto exposure re-reads the scene as you turn and makes the same wall two different colours across the sequence.
- White balance, locked. Same problem, in hue. Set it once for the space you are in.
- Focus, locked. Autofocus hunting mid-move produces frames the solver cannot use.
- Shutter fast enough to freeze your walking pace. Motion blur removes the detail everything downstream depends on.
After that, a gimbal or stabiliser is the highest-value purchase on the list, and a wide lens is the second — wider frames overlap more, which is what the reconstruction is actually hungry for.
A working kit list, in order of what to buy first
This is what we would put together for an agency starting out, roughly in the order it pays back.
- Stabiliser or gimbal. The single biggest quality jump for the money.
- Current phone or mirrorless body with manual video controls and a wide lens.
- A monopod or extension pole, for the high pass over furniture and site clutter.
- Portable lighting for interiors — even, indirect, and left in one place for the whole capture.
- A machine with a capable GPU, or a cloud processing account. This is where the real hardware cost sits, not on the camera.
- 360 camera, optional, useful for fast coverage of corridors and awkward plant rooms.
Notice what is not on the list: a laser scanner. If you need survey-grade measurement, that is a separate deliverable, and pairing a splat with a point cloud is usually cheaper than trying to make one do both jobs.
The production pipeline, end to end
A commercial capture has six stages, and only the second happens on site.
- 1. Brief. What is the scene for, who opens it, what do they need to see, where will it be embedded?
- 2. Capture. Route planned, settings locked, coverage at three heights, loop closed.
- 3. Reconstruct. Solve the camera positions, then train the scene. Mostly waiting.
- 4. Clean. Remove floaters, crop to the subject, fix the ground plane, set the default camera.
- 5. Optimise. Compress for delivery and set up level of detail so a phone visitor gets something in a couple of seconds.
- 6. Publish. Viewer, navigation, hotspots, branding, analytics, and the embed for the client’s own site.
Stages four to six are where projects overrun, because they are the ones nobody budgets for. Assume the desk work is at least as long as the shoot.
Property, construction and events want different things
Property and lettings want speed and flattering light. The value is turnaround: a capture that goes live with the listing rather than a week after it. Standardise a route per property type and stop refining.
Construction and asset owners want comparability. The same route, the same heights, the same day of the month, so two captures can be put side by side and argued over in a progress meeting. Set that standard on visit one, because retrofitting it is impossible.
Events and brand work want the scene to be a destination. That means branding, a guided route, hotspots that link out, and analytics on what people actually explored. The capture is maybe a third of the work.
Delivery is the part clients judge you on
Clients do not experience your reconstruction quality. They experience how long the page took to load on their phone on the train. A scene straight out of training is far too heavy to send to a browser, and the difference between an impressive tour and an abandoned one is almost always compression and level of detail rather than capture quality.
Set a delivery budget before you shoot — something meaningful on a mobile connection — and treat it as a hard constraint. It will change how much of the site you capture, and that is a useful conversation to have early rather than after the invoice.
Build the workflow on tools you control
The last thing worth planning is where the scenes live. Hosting client work inside somebody else’s consumer platform is quick, and it means your branding, your analytics and your client’s privacy terms are all decided by a third party who can change them.
We built our own for exactly that reason, and both are free to use: the Gaussian splat editor for cleaning, cropping and framing, and the studio viewer for publishing and embedding. Finished examples are in the Gaussian worlds gallery. If you need a white-labelled version under your own domain, that is a normal piece of work rather than a special request.
Common questions
What camera is best for Gaussian splat capture?
The one you can move smoothly and lock the settings on. A recent phone in a gimbal, shooting flat-profile video with fixed exposure and focus, outperforms a much more expensive camera used carelessly. Spend money on stabilisation and lighting before sensors.
Should I shoot video or stills?
Video for speed and coverage, stills for quality. Video gives you thousands of frames in minutes but each frame is softer and more compressed. Stills give cleaner input and are worth it for hero scenes and anything that will be printed or projected. Many production captures use both.
How long does a commercial capture take?
On site, a residential property is typically under an hour and a floor of a commercial building is half a day. The site visit is rarely the constraint. Processing, cleanup and web preparation take longer, so quote and schedule around those.
Can I capture the same site every month for progress tracking?
Yes, and it is one of the strongest commercial uses — but only if you standardise the route, the height, the settings and the time of day on the first visit and repeat them exactly. Comparability is a discipline you set up once, not something you can add later.
What does a Gaussian splat project cost?
A single scene delivered in a viewer is small scoped work. A branded, multi-scene tour with navigation and analytics is closer to a rapid MVP, from £2,995. Repeat capture programmes are usually retained monthly. Send us the site and the purpose and we will price it properly.
Related guides
- Gaussian splat capture basics — start here if the format is new to you
- Best Gaussian splat virtual tour workflows — turning captures into tours that sell
- Gaussian worlds gallery — finished scenes and the tools behind them
- Spatial.io alternatives and Unity WebGL — where splats fit against other web 3D