Exterior 3D tours

Capture the outside of a finished job with Polycam, Scaniverse, LumaAI, or KIRI and let customers walk around it in 3D from your record page.

An exterior 3D tour lets your customers walk around a finished job in three dimensions, right from the record's public page. You capture the outside of the completed work with a phone app, upload the file, and a homeowner who taps your tap card in the driveway can orbit around their new roof on their phone the same day.

This is an exterior-only feature. A 3D tour is designed for the outside of a finished job: a completed roof, new siding, a full-property walk-around. Interior walkthroughs are not supported.

New feature: Exterior 3D tours are brand-new. If you run into anything unexpected, reach out to support.

What you need

You capture the exterior with a phone app that exports a Gaussian splat file. The following apps are supported:

  • Polycam: export as .ply or .splat
  • Scaniverse: export as .ply or .spz
  • LumaAI: export as .ply or .splat
  • KIRI Engine: export as .ply or .splat

Saw Your Sign accepts .ply, .splat, and .spz files up to 200 MB. Walk around the outside of the finished job and export from your capture app before uploading. After you upload, Saw Your Sign optimizes the capture for fast, smooth playback, which takes a moment before the tour goes live.

Add an exterior 3D tour to a record

  1. Open the record in the dashboard (go to Records, find the job, and click Edit).
  2. Scroll down to the Exterior 3D tour section, below the photo gallery.
  3. Click Choose file (or drag your .ply / .splat / .spz file onto the upload area).
  4. The file uploads directly to your media storage. When the upload finishes, the tour appears in the list and shows Processing… for a moment while it is optimized. Once it flips to ready, the tour is live on the public page.

You can attach more than one tour to the same record if you want to show multiple angles or capture dates.

To remove a tour, click the delete button next to it. The file is removed immediately.

Tip: Right after uploading, a tour is optimized on the server (converted to a compact format), so it shows Processing… for a moment before it goes live. Optimized tours are much smaller than the original capture, so they open quickly for visitors.

How visitors see the tour

On the record's public page, a "View in 3D" tile appears alongside the photo gallery when a 3D tour is attached. Visitors click or tap it to open the viewer right in the page. The viewer lets them orbit, zoom, and pan around the exterior using touch or mouse controls.

The tour section has a #tour anchor, so you can deep-link directly to it: share yoursite.sawyoursign.com/jobs/the-record-name#tour and the page scrolls straight to the 3D viewer.

The viewer runs entirely in the browser using WebGL2. It works in current versions of Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Edge on both desktop and mobile. Visitors on older browsers or devices without WebGL2 support see a message explaining that 3D is not available on their device.

The tap-card workflow

The most common way customers find the tour is through your tap card:

  1. You finish the job and capture the exterior with Polycam or another supported app.
  2. You upload the .ply or .splat file to the record, then publish it.
  3. You place a tap card (or QR card) near the job: in the driveway, on the door, or in the leave-behind packet.
  4. The homeowner taps the card, lands on the record's public page, and immediately sees the "View in 3D" tile alongside the photos.

The whole loop, from capture to a live viewer, takes only a few minutes once you have the export file ready.

What's next