Floor Plan File Formats: What Each Giraffe360 Download Is For

Floor plans from a Giraffe360 capture download as PNG or JPG images, with SVG and DXF files where your subscription includes them, and the Lidar scan behind the plans comes as point clouds: an E57 file for the merged cloud and a PLY file for each scan. Which one to send depends on what the person receiving it will do, whether that is showing the layout, redrawing it or measuring the space itself.

The Listing Image and What It Shows

PNG and JPG are the standard formats, and they are the floor plans an agent puts in a listing. They are pictures, and the disclaimer in a plan's sidebar says so: "Measurements are approximate and not to scale. This floor plan is intended for illustration only." The line is about the drawing, whose walls are tidied up so the plan reads well; the dimensions and areas printed on it come from the Lidar data the Giraffe360 camera measured on site.

The floor plan editor decides which numbers appear. Under Settings, Room measurements shows each room's dimensions, its area or nothing. Dimensions give the length of a room's longest walls, and area gives its size in square feet or square metres, which dimensions can't tell you for a room that isn't a rectangle. Display secondary units puts a second unit beside the main one. The sidebar adds the totals, such as the approximate total area and any reduced headroom area, and its disclaimer names the measurement standard behind the calculations. Save & close keeps the changes, and the updated plans are the ones to download.

Two more files can sit beside the plans. Some projects have a Property map under Floor plans, a top-down or isometric view of the property that downloads as a PNG or JPG too. A project measured to Canada's RMS standard also has Export RMS, which saves the area report once the floor plans are complete.

When the Plan Has to Be Edited, SVG and DXF

Restyling the plan or drawing over it takes a vector file, and Giraffe360 has two, the SVG and the DXF, which come with an add-on.

The SVG suits a designer who wants the plan in their own colours or with different furniture. It holds the parts of the image as separate layers, from the room names and areas to the windows and doors, and Adobe Illustrator, CorelDraw and Inkscape all open it. It keeps the image's straightened walls too, so it is no better for measuring than the PNG.

The DXF is the file to measure from. It draws the plan as accurately as the scan allows, without the adjustments made for looks, at 1:1 scale with one unit to a centimetre, which makes it the file for planning a remodel. AutoCAD, Revit, Chief Architect and other CAD software open it, and whoever receives it should import it with centimetres as the unit so the drawing measures like the property. It is a 2D drawing with no height information, and it doesn't represent the rooms in 3D.

The Scan Itself in E57 and PLY

Behind the images and the vector files is the point cloud. Every scan the Giraffe360 camera takes measures the room with Lidar, and the measured points together describe the space; the dimensions and areas on the plans are taken from them.

It comes in two point cloud file formats. The E57 is the merged cloud, with the scans stitched together floor by floor. E57 is the format of ASTM E2807, a standard first issued in 2011 for exchanging data from 3D imaging systems such as laser scanners between programs. An E57 file holds the points with attributes such as colour or intensity, and it can carry the photographs taken with them. The PLY files are the same data before stitching, one file per scan. PLY, also called the Stanford Triangle Format, stores one object per file as a list of points with properties such as colour, so the E57 gives a whole floor in one file while the PLY files keep each scan in a file of its own.

Whether point clouds appear in a project depends on your subscription. Where point cloud access is enabled for a project, a developer can also fetch the merged and single-scan clouds, with the rest of its media, through the Project API of the Giraffe360 API.

What Reaches the Client as a Link or a Video

The 3D floor plan isn't downloaded at all. It is an interactive player with a 2D view, a 3D view that can open into the virtual tour, and a sun path where one has been generated. It goes out as a link from the 3D Floor plan card's Links, either the regular 3D floor plan link or the Listing site friendly one, which leaves out branding, contact information and links for the portals, and it can be embedded in a website.

The cinematic, drone and orbital videos are made from the capture with Gaussian splatting, which needs double scans in the rooms the videos should show. They download as finished videos; the 3D model behind them isn't one of the downloads.

Getting Each File to the Right Person

The files download from the project in the dashboard:

1. Open the project from Projects and select Content.
2. On the Floor plans card, or the card of the content you want, open the three-dot menu and select Download all or Download.
3. Choose the format: PNG or JPG for the floor plans, SVG or DXF where they are offered, E57 or PLY for a point cloud.
4. Select Download if a confirmation appears, and wait for the file to be prepared before you open it.

To save one floor on its own, open the floor plan card's preview and choose that floor's layout.

The agent gets the PNG or JPG for the listing and the 3D floor plan link for the portal. The SVG goes to whoever restyles the plan in the agency's colours. An architect or builder planning a remodel gets the DXF to draw on and, where your subscription includes point clouds, the E57 for the measured floor, with the PLY files if they want the scans one by one.