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New Features and Improvements for Road and Railway Projects

SkyGIS Pro just received its biggest targeted feature expansion to date! Built from the ground up for road and railway construction, this update equips both surveyors and designers with powerful new tools—plus a round of quality-of-life polish to keep your projects running seamlessly. Let's dive in.

Road and Railway monitoring toolkit

Designed to streamline site monitoring, this feature package empowers construction teams to track progress against design using point clouds, IFC models, and LandXML files. Building on our established deviation analysis capabilities, SkyGIS Pro now offers complete alignment flexibility—automatically recognizing LandXML alignments, converting existing layers or lines, or letting you extract custom polylines. Using these alignments as a baseline, you can run surface difference calculations across IFC, LandXML, TIN, or point cloud data to compute cut-and-fill volumes at custom stationing increments.

Explore alignments effortlessly with the all-new browser bar, giving you complete control to filter and isolate critical site data.

Alignment browsing with ease

Once a surface difference calculation is run, SkyGIS Pro provides versatile visualization tools—including column charts, tabular views, and cross-section displays—to streamline monitoring and mapping workflows. Export insights seamlessly via PDF reports, detailed DXF drawings, or raw CSV files for downstream analysis. You can also generate derived point clouds, orthoimages, and 3D models to ensure complete material tracking throughout the construction lifecycle.

Column chart for cut-fill volumes along the alignment
Summary table for each station along the alignment
Get information about cut-fill at every location

We are continuously refining these capabilities to bring intuitive, cost-effective site monitoring tools to an even broader range of users.

IFC - LandXML export

IFC and LandXML serve different scenarios. While surveyors primarily use LandXML for linear construction, architects and designers rely more on IFC. Converting between these two formats is not always straightforward—and sometimes not possible—because LandXML cannot handle vertical surfaces.

To bridge this, we have introduced an experimental feature that extracts surfaces directly from IFCs for surface difference calculations. While results depend on the quality of the source IFC file, this option offers a major time-saving shortcut for standard site models.

Generate difference mesh from LandXML files

In some scenarios, calculating total volume isn't enough to evaluate the full scope of surface changes—you need a detailed visual model. We’ve introduced a LandXML-to-LandXML difference mesh (or 3D body) generator that creates a color-coded 3D model mapping the exact elevation deltas between surfaces.

Difference model from LandXML comparison

Mosaic51 camera support

Our system now supports Mosaic51 camera formats. Mosaic51 is a premier developer of camera-centric mobile mapping solutions, and this update enables users to effortlessly process point clouds and high-quality images generated by the Mosaic Meridian and associated scanners.

Sample image from SkyGIS with Mosaic Meridian dataset

Improvements and fixes

The following things has been improved or fixed based on user feedbacks:

  • New user organisations now have a Demo Project that features various data types

  • We have enhanced the processing display to provide further information during and after the processing tasks

  • Icon refubishment has been performed in the toolbars, view type setting now has a 3-way switch

  • Jump to center option become available for even more data types

  • Now you can change the rotation center using double-left click in the viewer

That’s all for now, but stay tuned for future updates!